I have burned several DVD+R DL's of the same brand with this burner in the past, but for some reason I can no longer. When attempting to burn, ImgBurn acts normally, but then I hear a quiet clicking sound coming from the burner (probably not good) and I'm greeted with with:
Failed to Write Sectors 0 - 31 - Reason: Session Fixation Error Writing Lead In
It then retries 20 more times and fails every time, the drive clicking the whole time. Normally I'd say the drive is just plain worn out and dead. However, it can still burn any other media. The only thing I can come up with is that the laser, for some reason, can no longer focus enough to burn to the lower layer of the disc.
Any ideas on the clicking sound especially?
UPDATE: I flashed to BenQ 1650 firmware, as suggested on another forum and the problem is similar only now it spins the disc loudly as it clicks. I ran QSuite QScan on the disc and got what appear to be very bad results on 2.4x. From my understanding, the lines should be somewhat smooth, but mine are very jagged.
It sounds as though your drive is incompatible with the DL discs you are recording. The fact that they are the same brand means little if the brand can stay the same but the supplier, rated speed, and manufacturing method can all change. The clicking noise comes from the optical pickup unit frantically trying to adjust for the best recording in a range it cannot reach.
There are only a few options: try recording with Verbatim DL discs manufactured in Singapore to which all DL drives are tuned or buy a new drive and experiment.
Philips drives are notorious.. I have an ancient one that gives me all kinds of problems.. apart from it only burns + media it locks up and needs resetting (hdparm -W /device/) every single time it is run.
How does this drive behave on normal dvd-r disks? It may benefit from a good clean or relegation to being a ripping drive (dvd-rom) instead.
With the drive being incompatible, would it be likely for the manufacturer to change mid-stack? Because this disc is from the same stack as all the other discs I've used to record before.
With any media besides DVD+R DL, it works perfectly fine.
No. This is a bit of information that would have pointed to a change inthe drive, not in the media. Check the DL discs you have recorded before to see the error profile of those discs. If the profile is low, there is likely to be something wrong with the drive. If the profile is very high, as I suspect it may be, then the incompatibility finally had a deleterious effect on the drive as it struggled to find the proper settings.
There is also a possibility that you are now using discs from the bottom of a spindle where uneven pressure from the discs above may have deformed the lower discs slightly. It doesn't take much for DVDs to deform. A paper label expanding and contracting with the absorption of humidity can alter the flatness of a disc enough to make it unreadable. (The error profiles may provide an indication of this if they increase steadily to the outside if the disc where the layer change happens, then slowly decrease as the pickup head returns toward the center. The error profile would look like a classic bell curve except for extraordinarily high error peaks at the layer transition.
Yeah.. there is something wrong with the drive.. It's a philips XD
Often drives will show their first signs of failure by refusing to change the focal length to burn the second layer.. Maybe new firmware will help.. but does anybody even bother writing hacked firmware for philips?
