Can't burn DVD+R with K3B

[thomas.hedden]

I recently replaced the internal CD-RW drive, which
worked fine with K3B, with an internal DVD+RW drive.
I tried using the DVD+RW drive to burn CD-Rs, and it
works without any issues at all. However, if I insert
a blank DVD+R disk, K3B asks me the usual questions,
and seems to work up to the point when I click the
"burn" button. At that point, the drive starts to write,
but then the whole system just hangs.
I don't get any error messages, and the ENTIRE OS
hangs. That is, I cannot access a console to kill the
process, it does not respond to CTRL-ALT_Backspace.
The only way I have been able to escape is by
powering down the computer.
Does anyone have any idea what is wrong and/or
whether it can be corrected and/or what I have to do
to get it working?
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Tom
P.S. The version of K3B is fairly old; does that matter?
Was there a problem with earlier versions?

[gogalthorp]

It would help if you told us the version of Suse and the version of K3B.

Also where did you get K3B. Did you install from the Suse repository?

[yancek]

I've had similar problems but even with just CD's and I think that older versions may be the problem. I have had Suse Linux 9.2 which was originally released in October, 2004 and have problems with k3b using it. I have multiple OS's and when I switch to a new distro release, using k3b, it works.

If you have a new DVD Writer using old software, I would try newer software. Updating k3b or updating your OS, or using a Live CD are options.

The other mort common problems are bad medium, bad cable or loose power/ribbon cables, bad or weak power supply or a bad cd/dvd device. These don't seem realistic as problems given you have a new device and CD recording seems to work.

[thomas.hedden]

> ... version of Suse ...
9.0, upgraded to 9.1. KDE 3.1.4.

> ... version of K3B.
K3b 0.10. Copyright 1999-2003

> ... where did you get K3B.
It was installed when I installed SuSE Linux.

I know it's old, and that's the reason I asked
whether the version mattered.

> I think that older versions may be the problem.
I'll try updating K3b.

Thanks,

Tom

[gogalthorp]

Hardware evolves over time. The Interfaces change, timings change etc. The Software that manages the hardware must therefore change to accommodate the new hardware specs. Suse 9.1 is very old now released in 2004. You will find that upgrading K3B may be a problem because then newer versions will require newer libraries and those libraries will require other libraries etc. These newer libraries may not be compatible with other things on your system. This is like expecting hardware that has only Vista drivers to run on XP.

[D-cat]

You can still get support for OpenSuSE 10.3, it comes with KDE 3.5 and K3B, which backends tools that were written with DVD burners in mind (likely the SuSE 9 tools were not). I don't know what you have for system specs, but I imagine that 10.3 should run okay on a system that ran 9.2 well.

If you have 512MB+ RAM, you may want to go right forward to 11.1 for the latest stuff and the longest available support. My only suggestion is if you keep KDE, to select Other -> KDE 3.5 Desktop; KDE4 is still a bit buggy, and last I heard had a specific issue with K3B and DVD's.