Lester Burnham

Just as further feedback to this, since turning off all overclocking options, burning and verifying has been rock-solid for me. I would have expected some drive lock-ups within that time, such that I would have had to power off the PC. The drive is a SATA Samsung SH-223F drive, mobo is ASUS M2N68-CM, CPU is dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+. Maybe it's a drive mobo combination that causes the lockups when overclocked? Maybe there's some other overclock options I've not selected that were causing the problem. It would be interesting to hear if anybody else who's had the lock-up problems had any of these combinations?

I wasn't trying to imply that all overclock setups may have the same problem - just the reverse of that - I've seen occasional reporting of the very same problem I was having, and for people encountering that, it may be worth turning off any overclocking and testing.

I previously posted about some problems I'd been having with imgburn, in this thread and was starting to wonder if my drive was going a bit funky. Anyway, I recently upped the overclocking of my PC (not done by bus clock frequency upping, but predefined CPU overclock profiles in BIOS) to the highest amount (7% - 5% is the middle option, and 3% the lowest). When overclocked by 7% I couldn't get imgburn to actually write a disk (it would lock up, and imgburn couldn't effectively be killed - even if the GUI disappeared, the process would still be active in task manager). File save / open dialogs would hang in windows, and shutdown or reboots would fail (probably due to the imgburn process not being able to be killed, which in turn is probably because the drive would not respond?). Shutting down the PC would require a physical power off (holding down the power button for 5 seconds). Three blanks in a row failed like this. Previously I think I'd only used the 3% overclock profile, and had more occasional problems. So I turned the overclocking off, disk burnt without problems. So maybe that was my issue all along - perhaps the combination of drive and overclocking when using imgburn caused the DVD drive to lock up? I'm going to leave overclocking turned off (probably permanently) and see how burning and reading stability goes. BTW, cooling is not a problem, I monitor motherboard and CPU temps, and have additional cooling so it all runs OK. Overclocking isn't important to me, the extra cooling was added when I'd noticed that it ran a bit hot normally, when doing heavy processing type activities (video encoding, that sort of thing).

I've used imgburn since it was released, and kept up with the versions (I'm running 2.4.2.0) Recently, I've been having issues on a new PC (using a Samsung SH-223F running the latest SB03 firmware). It doesn't occur with every burn, but in many. It occurs at the verify stage, the drive tray gets recycled and then imgburn freezes / locks-up during the reading / verify bit. It tends to have not actually read anything or made any progress, although on occasion it can do a similar trick, part way through reading the disc. Up to that point, there's not been any read errors or verify fails or anything like that, it just seems to hang imgburn. Trying to quit imgburn doesn't affect the imgburn gui (although it seems to recognise the attempt), nor does killing the process through task manager do any good. And because it seems well and truly locked-up (although the rest of the Windows desktop - XP SP3 - responds fine), shutdowns don't progress (presumably because imgburn can't be stopped). I have tried resetting imgburn's settings to default. And some history to the drive's firmware - going back a version, I did enable a slightly higher read rate for the drive (up to 18x), but I had a lock-up and a failed burn, so I removed that option. I currently have read and write set to max through imgburn, which would be 16x for the media I'm currently using. The types of disc I'm burning are DVD-Video (very much in the main, anyway), and are typically DVDs I've authored myself and use imgburn in build mode to write the disk. Because of this problem, I'm now actually using DVDDecrypter to burn (because that's what I always used to use before imgburn was released), and use imgburn to create an iso from the DVD folders (used to use imgtool classic before imgburn, for that task), which seems completely reliable. Is there anything I can do to avoid this, or has anybody else experienced similar? I'm not so much of the belief that it's a media or hardware mismatch, as I didn't always have this problem with imgburn (only had the PC for a couple of months, and it was fine to start outwith), and DVDdecrypter seems to be very reliable for burning right now (as it always was for me, which is why I've reverted to it for the moment). Any help or advice would be appreciated.