Hello

Just joined in an attempt to find some advice on a problem we have here. I’m looking for a piece of software (runs on Linux) to run a stressful read/write test on my DVD drives. What I want is something that will write a bit pattern to a DVD which I can then take to another drive to read and get an analysis report. I’m trying to quantify an apparent capability problem between our DVDs and readers.


My company develops and delivers a software product for use in Linux, Windows, and UNIX platforms. On one of our boxes we run Linux Kernel V2.4.34.2 and deliver using DVD’s. The DVD is created using home grown scripts taking advantage of makeisofs etc… We see a problem where a DVD (using Memorex DVD +R 16X 4.7GB) we create will work on one DVD Rom drive and not another. The readers are all the same (TEAC DV-28E-V93) and all DVDs will work using the DVD RW drive (TEAC DV-W28E C-093). The failure appears to be at a consistent point on one reader and fail at a different point on a different. Try again on a third and guess what! It passes. I’ve taken the “failed” DVDs to a DVD duplicating tower and ran a compare against one of the “good” DVDs and had no problems. I’ve also ran md5sum on each and they match. We are now at the point where we think it may be a compatibility issue. Since it’s impractical to validate each dvd on several different drives (each verification takes over an hour) and I’d really like to get to the bottom of this, I’m looking for a method to “trap” the failure and get some sort of descriptive analysis. I have a service call into TEAC about firmware upgrades etc but I expect that this will not go well.