dbminter

From what I've seen, when you start getting Power Calibration Errors after you have had no problem with burning discs before, your drive most likely needs replacing. Unfortunately, dual layer burning will generally be the first thing to fail in a drive. Everything else will, generally, still burn fine as long as its single layer. And most burning errors will occur at the layer break.

Have you always had this: W 17:57:38 Duplex Secure's SPTD driver can have a detrimental effect on drive performance. and you were able to burn fine? Or is Secure's SPTD driver something you just recently installed? The only thing I can offer is that. If that's even a suspect or not, I can't say.

If you do get an external burner, do not get a slim model. Get a full height drive. Slim drives are mostly junk. Yes, a drive should last longer than a year, but they generally don't. That's the problem with things made to sell for a profit. They're designed to die early so you'll buy another one. I've had a Blu-Ray drive from LiteOn that died after 3 months. However, I've had a good run with my Pioneer Blu-Ray burner. It was a year and a half before I had to replace it and it only needed replacing because sometimes, like 1 out of 10, pressing the Eject button would not eject the tray. Pressing it again would. It still burns fine and I still have it in reserve should I need it.

Well, they're MCC media so you're using quality media. It can't be the media, since you get the same error on CMC and MCC media; it's most likely the drive. It probably needs replacing. If your computer is 2 years old, have you been burning discs for those 2 years? In other words, you got successful burns before in the past but aren't anymore? If you've been burning for 2 years, then you're lucky it's lasted that long. Most drives I've had needed replacing after a year at best. Unfortunately, just because a drive can still play DVD's doesn't mean it hasn't failed in writing. In fact, just because a drive still writes other kinds of media, it can still need replacing. My experience has been that when drives fails to write DVD+R DL at the layer break, they'll still write DVD+-R and RW and CD-R/RW fine. Dual layer media tends to fail first. Near as I know, power calibration errors aren't the result of a power calibration setting you can change. Power calibration is down to the drive. Seems to me if there's a power calibration error, that's a hardware error, if you've ruled out cheap media.

For DVD-R, here's what I get: Branded AZO non DataLife Plus: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00081A2KY/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Inkjet DataLife Plus: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000A0CV9S/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 These are made by MCC, Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, aka Verbatim. Notice how CMC is just a rearrangement of MCC? I think it's done on purpose to try and fool people.

Yeah, I learned the hard way by buying Verbatim CD-R and DVD-R at Office Depot. They were CMC MAG and they were Life series. I promptly returned them for a refund because Verbatim didn't make them. CMC Magnetics made them. I don't know why DataLife Plus series is only available from online sellers. I'd have hoped Verbatim would offer the discerning buyer a choice of quality or crap instead of just crap at brick and mortar stores. I buy some DVD-R from Amazon.com that don't say DataLife Plus but are the higher quality. They have the AZO brand on them. I don't know if the DVD+R you bought say AZO or not. If they don't, then you'll want something online that says either AZO or DataLife Plus. My inkjet DVD-R are DataLife Plus but my branded DVD-R from Amazon.com don't say DataLife Plus, just AZO. Yeah, it's all too confusing when it shouldn't have to be. It's only done that way to squeeze an extra dollar from buyers.

Probably because you bought them in a brick and mortar store? If so, even though they're Verbatims, they're cheap ass CMC MAG media You'll want DataLife Plus media, but you can only get that online. If you got just Life series Verbatims in a store or online, they're junk. So, Verbatim is the best choice, but you have to get the right Verbatims Yes, even Verbatim mixes their quality releases with junk CMC media to squeeze an extra buck out of their customers. Well, if you've used them before in the past, maybe they weren't always CMC MAGs. Companies are known to change their manufacturers from quality to cheap CMC. I put Optodisc on my shit list because after a run of high quality discs they produced, they switched to CMC MAG and 50% of their discs failed. If you can find one of these Verbatim DVD+R's you have successfully burned in the past, load it in ImgBurn and see if it's DID/MID/Disc ID/Manufacturer ID is CMC MAG. If it is and you had no problems in the past, then your drive probably needs replacing. How long have you been burning with it? Still, you shouldn't use CMC MAG, even if they do successfully burn. Their longevity is highly questionable.

Yeah, I'd guess it's the cheap CMC MAG media that's causing the problem.

I don't know what you mean by an optical unit/scanner. Your PC's DVD drive should be all that you need. Yeah, try the Read mode, but I doubt if it will detect anything is in the drive as I believe the disc is dead. Especially if it doesn't play in a DVD player on in your PC drive. You may get a partial read, but I think there's simply nothing there to read at all.

If I had to guess, it's the CMC MAG discs you're using. However, I don't necessarily know that that error message is related to cheap discs. LUK can give you more information about that error, though. Is this the first time you've tried a burn? Or have you used these discs before? If they worked before, then maybe the drive is dying.

My guess is they are cheap discs and after all these years the layers rotted. I believe BeAll is a pretty bottom of the barrel manufacturer of DVD recordable media. Can you play them on PC? If they play on PC then they are still playable. If they're not playable on PC, which is more forgiving of disc abnormalities, then the issue is with the DVD player. However, I'd be willing to bet the discs are just dead. Try a Read mode in ImgBurn and see if you can read them to an image file. If you can, then they are still readable. However, I'd be willing to bet they're not readable anymore. Or, at least, they're only partially readable. They may start reading to image files but may not finish. My guess is they're not readable at all and you won't even be able to start an image read. Cheap discs can last anywhere from less than a year to a few years before they rot.

If it's a DVD Video disc, use DVDShrink to shrink it by 1% and it should probably fit.

Yeah, it was some kind of drag and drop area icon, I think. That sounds like what you say. I just tried it. It was the Drop Zone. Thanks!

I was in Build mode and I accidentally pressed a keyboard combination I didn't intend to. I don't know what it was, but what it brought up was a large ImgBurn icon between the Build interface window and the log window. I was able to get rid of this icon by right clicking on it and selecting Close. I was just wondering what this icon was, how I brought it up, and what it does? Thanks!

Yeah, I always thought SATA was faster than USB 3. I, too, don't know about 3.1, though.

I think you still did.

Semaphore timeout errors are, unfortunately, a bane with external burners. It's caused by a conflict between the USB bridge in the drive and your PC's motherboard. The only generally known accepted fix is to replace either the bridge in the drive, the motherboard, or replace the external drive with another one. There are some steps that some people have employed that have worked in the past, but I don't know what they are. Someone else will have to pass that information along. Over a decade ago, I had a USB DVD burner that suffered from the dreaded semaphore timeout issue. I never could fix it and just had to replace it. Although for a long time, I kept the drive for testing purposes as a beta tester. I eventually got rid of it, forgetting I wanted to keep it for testing purposes.

I know it's possible, but I didn't know if ImgBurn could do it. I never tried. Over a decade ago, I used to put CD cover art JPG's on CD-R's I'd make from Audio CD's in my collection. I stopped doing it once I noticed some DVD players that play CD's wouldn't play the audio tracks. They'd apparently default to the photo content on the disc instead of the audio tracks.

That seemed to work! dvrtool -f <Drive Letter>: 132 flashed one of my drives back to 1.33 according to the startup text from ImgBurn. Thanks for the help!

Oh, you replied while I was replying. I saw a 1 update added while typing and you seem to have found the same information I did.

I extracted Updater.exe's contents. The only thing that might be the firmware is in a folder called BINARY. It's a file called 132, no extension, but it's about 1.8 MB.

Yeah, I loaded the .EXE in RAR because it was self extracting archive, but it only contained another .EXE and instructions on running it silently. I'd guess that Updater.exe's largest internal file would be the firmware file.

Won't I need the actual 1.33 firmware file itself? The only thing I have is an .EXE updater for the drive.

The 1.33 firmware was fine for my needs, so you can probably update to that without problem. But, I can understand if you're wary of updating something that works since you can't downgrade Pioneer firmware as far as I know. My external Asus is the BW-12D1S-U, yes. I can recommend that but I CANNOT recommend the ASUS BW-16D1HT SATA burner! Here's my negative review I posted on Amazon.com: "I cannot recommend this drive. After putting it through several tests, it has failed on a variety of media. This appears to destroy rewritable media! I threw about half a dozen Ritek 8x DVD+RW at it. After a few writes, this drive would eventually write to the disc and render it empty. However, on inserting the disc into any drive afterwards, the drive lights flash infinitely. Windows will not recognize a disc has been inserted but File Explorer will list the disc as empty. I tried the same on a Verbatim BD-RE DL. It did the same thing. So, this drive destroys rewritable media. NOT a good selling point. I inserted 2 Verbatim BD-RE DL that had been formatted by Windows as giant floppies. I copied over files to them and on random files, Windows would return the "error" Cannot read from source file or disc. Immediately selecting Retry resumes the copy. It did this once on the first disc and twice on the 2nd. However, the real killer is the files actually written to the media are not written correctly! I copied over many parts in a chain of a file backup from Macrium Reflect to these discs. Reflect would load the last file in the chain to get the list of files from the archive. However, on Verify, the first file would fail to read from the first disc! It would cause Reflect to Not Respond and eventually return the "error" Verification failure Read error - permission denied. So, this means the drive wasn't even correctly writing to the BD-RE DL media. Even after I replaced the destroyed disc with a new one. Again, another NOT good selling point. I had such high hopes for ASUS drives. After Pioneer borked their drives with the latest firmware, I had had an ASUS USB drive that performed almost flawlessly. It only failed on Ritek 6x DVD-RW, but ALL drives except Optiarc and LiteOn fail on them. So, I was looking to replace one of my Pioneers with an SATA ASUS. I am DEFINITELY sorry I went that route. ASUS is now also on my crap list. I would return this drive but I've already removed the proof of purchase from the box to send in for a rebate. Bottom line is this drive is junk. Do NOT buy!" Yeah, I ran the 1.33 firmware updater and it asks if I want to update the drives up just exits out after running without doing anything. Would have been nice if they'd SAID something about not being able to update the drives. Fuckers.

Came across someone's older Windows 7 refurbished Dell PC they got for $150. I checked out the DVD drive and noticed something I'd never seen before. The eject button was on the drive's tray itself! I ejected the tray and noticed that the drive appeared to be a slim drive made into the form factor of a full size drive. My guess is it's just a slim drive that was built to full size so it would fit in a full size bay.