[tech] DVD Burnage (long message!)

[David Adam]

Well, here's the deal.

As reported in the committee minutes of today, the DVD burner itself works
fine, burning at 2x quite happily on my home machines. It's also had the
firmware upgraded to the latest version (which means the drive is no
longer region-free, but this is no big deal, see below).

However, I slapped the drive back in Mussel and it's still not being seen
by Nero. The actual drive is readable from (AFAIK) but doesn't show up
either in Nero or the InfoTool.

I switched it from the Promise controller to the onboard secondary
channel, to no avail. Similar results from changing the IDE interface
cable (the replacement is still in there I believe).

I haven't tried it in Debian (need wheel access) but have no reason to
believe it would work any better there than yesterday.

Finally, it's not the influence of the other drive - we removed that from
the IDE chain with no effect.

Coxy has suggested putting the damn thing in Arctic and being done with
it, and I see no reason as to why this won't work, but I would rather not
do this myself - although it would be nice to watch, having had very
little experience with newer Macs.

Suggestions as to why else the DVD doesn't work in Cobbler would be nice.
Testing under CloneCD (installer on C:\Documents and
Settings\zanchey\Desktop) and under Linux by wheel members would also be
nice.

Failing that, let's move the damn thing to Arctic. It's a better machine
for burning anyway (more space etc).

Cheers,

David Adam
zanchey@

PS - re the whole region-free thing, I don't believe that firmware
solutions are necessary either under Linux or Windows nowadays. If anyone
absolutely burns to watch regioned DVDs, one of the wheelers can install
Region+CSS-Free or whatever they're calling it these days.