dbminter

Your most likely culprit is the CMC MAG DVD+R DL's you're using. CMC Magnetics makes the worst discs out there. (Ironically, they also own the company that releases the best, too!) MKM DVD+R DL from Verbatim DataLife Plus are the only reliable make of DVD+R DL out there. However, you said you were unable to procure MKM discs. Still, I think that's going to be your only solution.

I forget because it's been so long since I had a BH LG drive, but is the difference between it and the WH that the WH supports M-Disc and the BH doesn't? I forget if the BH model supported M-Disc writing.

For the past 5 or so years, Pioneer BD drives have had 2 fatal flaws. The first is they will always fail to write to Ricoh/Ritek 8x DVD+RW media, when they used to write fine up until like 1.03 firmware on some model from years ago. Ever since, they will always fail Verify, even when using unformatted discs. If you regressed the drive back to 1.02 firmware, writing was fine. Every firmware since has had this flaw. I keep telling Pioneer about it, every time I try one of their later models to see if they fixed it, but they refuse to. The MID is listed in the master media list, so there shouldn't be these compatibility issues, and there weren't until after like 1.03 of the firmware for that model. Also for the past few years, BD-RE from Ritek/Memorex refuse to Verify at anything beyond 2.1x for the vast majority of Verify time. So, it takes about twice as long to Verify a full BD-RE as it should. This is the 2nd fatal flaw in the firmware. Plus, the last Pioneer model I tried had no staying power whatsoever. Pioneer replaced it after before 2 months, when it died, and the replacement died after 2 months, too, necessitating a refund. All of these things turned me off from Pioneer, which I used to love. Pioneer made the first ODD I ever had that lasted beyond 2 years. I got 2.5 years out of that BD drive.

Ah, I was not aware the Optiarc was still in manufacture. I used to love those. They were my drives of choice until they disappeared, as far as I could tell. I use BD burners now, so I wouldn't get an Optiarc, but it's nice to hear they still make those. Thanks for pointing out about the Pioneer 213 line coming out. I was about to try a 212 again to see if Pioneer had fixed the glaring issues with the drives/firmware that turned me off of their models. But, if a new one is coming out possibly next month, I'll wait to see if a 213 is available.

That may have been the reason I couldn't get it to work all those years ago. I knew the Guide was a tad bit out of date and didn't think it might be a UEFI thing.

It's up to the user. You get lifetime, as far as I'm aware, upgrades for $20, but if you never use the software again, it can be pretty hard to justify the $20 for a one time use. I use it every time an update to Macrium Reflect comes out, as well as at the start of each new year when I move the monthly file backups to bootable Reflect recovery media with the image files on them. So, for me it was worth it.

As I said, I followed the guides a long time ago and never could get a bootable Windows disc. The ISO's when burnt to optical discs would never boot. Tried to get the same with Acronis True Image bootable discs. Attempting to build new discs never worked, which is why I resorted to UltraISO to inject/remove new files into bootable disc ISO's. I'd use ImgBurn to read the bootable discs to ISO and then UltraISO to edit the ISO's and ImgBurn to then, again, burn the UltraISO ISO's. to disc.

My guess is what happened the disc was used by something else like Nero before ImgBurn got to it. Nero notoriously leaves discs in incomplete statuses after writing to them. As LUK said, did you attempt a full erase/format in ImgBurn 2.5.8.0 before trying 2.4.4.0? I would be interested to see performing a full erase in 2.5.8.0 and then attempting a 2nd erase in 2.5.8.0. If the 2nd erase fails, then try the full erase with 2.4.4.0. If THAT works, then it would probably be worth something investigating as that is repeatable. I have years of ImgBurn installers archived. I may still have 2.4.4.0 and can test this myself if warranted.

Honestly, I never had any luck making any bootable discs using the guides or doing what the OP is attempting. What I do in a situation like this is use something that can inject or remove files from an ISO, like UltraISO, my choice. Then, I use ImgBurn to write the ISO UltraISO makes. UltraISO, however, is not freeware.

As I said, I've never burned an XBox game. Never have even owned a Microsoft console. So, I'm just going by general experience with burning discs and what I remembered from past posts about XBox burning. As LUK said, try the MKM discs which are the Verbatim DataLife Plus I recommended. However, you indicate you've used this drive before for burning XBox games. If you've also used the same DVD+R DL discs from Ritek that were working before but aren't anymore, that might indicate the drive needs replacing.

Oh, wait, I just noticed something from the log. You're using a slim model DVD burner. I've never burned XBox games, but last I recall, you needed a specific kind of DVD burner with a special firmware for properly writing XBox games that play. They were made before the creation of slim model drives, I think.

As I said, be sure you avoid the Verbatim Life Series you find in stores. They will be worse than the Ritek DVD+R DL. The DataLife Plus can only be found in online stores. If the problem persists, I'd look into your burner being the problem. It might need replacing.

Have you always used the same DVD+R DL discs for burning XBox games? I am drawn to this line in the log: I 12:16:41 Destination Media Type: DVD+R DL (Disc ID: RICOHJPN-D01-67) Generally, the only reliable DVD+R DL discs are the Verbatim DataLife Plus (NOT Life Series.) MKM's made by Mitsubishi.

The cable movement thing may be a sign of something else. It could indicate a failing cable or a failing USB port on either the drive enclosure or on your PC. You may want to try replacing the USB cable or try putting the cable in a different USB port on your PC. Plus, is this a USB 2.x or USB 3.0? USB 2.x, while technically possible, is not recommended for BD burners because of the throughput necessary for operation. If you're connected by USB 2.x, then movement of the cable could affect the burn.

It probably is LiteOn specific. I haven't used LiteOn in about a decade, which is about how long ago I remember last encountering record count.

Oh, you're concerned that the record count will somehow trigger a finite number of burns limitation? No. The record count just keeps track of how many discs the drive has burned. While there is a finite number of discs a drive will burn before it dies, and that varies based on how long the drive will last and how hard it's been used, it has nothing to do with the record count. There's no arbitrary limit that is triggered by the record count where a drive will stop burning discs. And ImgBurn doesn't care what the record count is beyond displaying it. It's been a long time since I've seen a record count returned by ImgBurn on a drive I've had. I had even forgotten it was a feature. It was that long ago.

That value may be individualistic to the brand of drive. Not all drives support keeping a burn record count. So, it may be a 2 digit or 3 digit value, depending on how the manufacturer implemented the feature.

If you burned 98% of 500 CMC BD-R correctly, with only 2% failures, consider yourself VERY lucky, particularly with a Pioneer drive. CMC Magnetics makes the absolute worst optical media out there. (Ironically enough, they own Verbatim, which sells the best DVD media out there (Mitsubishi actually makes it for them, though.).) The very nature of CMC media is you can go without failures and then get many within the same cake stack of discs. If the failures persist over a given amount of time, you might want to try and see if replacing the Pioneer helps. 500 discs is an awful lot to burn and generally well beyond the life capacity of an optical burner. Although, Pioneer used to make the best drives out there for a while, so maybe their quality has increased back to where it used to be.

Well, the answer is you're using CD-R's. ImgBurn is not write protecting CD-R's as CD-R's as what are called WORM's. That stands for Write Once Read Many. You can only write to a CD-R once in ImgBurn. You can write to CD-R's more than once if you're using packet writing, which is what Windows/File Explorer does when you write a CD-R as a giant floppy. But, ImgBurn only writes to a CD-R once. If you want to reuse CD media, you need CD-RW.

I would also question the integrity of your C:\ (Stupid emoji!) device.

It sounds like you're not writing to an image file first and burning to discs? If you're getting failure to read while burning and ruining discs because the writes don't complete, it sounds like you're burning on the fly. Try writing to an image file first and then burn the image. If you're getting the failure to read the file while burning to the image file first, at least you're not going to ruin discs. If you ARE writing to image files first and burning those, I can't see why you'd get a read failure on something like a JPG.

The problem you're most likely going to run into is how Sony defined the Blu-Ray player standard. For instance, you can put BD video on a DVD if it's small enough and a BD player will play it, but you cannot put DVD Video on a BD and get it to play. The way it's defined is the player generally (Not always.) checks what kind of media is inserted. If it's a CD, it will attempt to play music. If it's a DVD, it will attempt to play a DVD Video. If it's a BD, it will attempt to play a BD movie. Since UHD is so large it general precludes anything but BD media, UHD probably checks for a BD before attempting to play it.

Go by Pioneer's sites and check out their burners. They usually offer multiple kinds of their models with fewer features for people who want to save on price. Although you may be wary of their hardware after your experience.

By wasting a disc, I was thinking of putting in a BD-R that wasn't an M-Disc. You might end up wasting a BD-R that isn't an M-Disc. The big question is exactly what kind of response would you get in a non M-Disc burner if you inserted an M-Disc BD. Would you get incompatible media? Or just an infinite loop attempting to load the disc? Or, worst case scenario, you attempt to write an M-Disc in a non M-Disc burner and the drive attempts it, but can't, but still wrote just enough to make the disc unusable in an M-Disc burner.

Barring that one hiccup I had earlier which succeeded on the next disc I attempted to burn, I've had no issues since that one recently. Which means, most likely, the BD-R that did fail was just a bad one in the batch. While an MID can say anything in its string, including M-Disc, I doubt very few M-Disc manufacturers will do that. So, no there most likely won't be anything anywhere in the MID that says M-Disc. As far as I know, there's no way to tell if a disc is an M-Disc after you've burned it. The obvious way to tell before burning is try burning it on a non M-Disc drive. However, you'd probably end up wasting a disc that way, so it's not practical.