Constant DVD Verification failures! Help!

[snowdog63]

Hi all.

 

This morning I attempted to burn a copy of a disc that I burned quite happily on Friday.

 

Verification failed.

 

I now have a nice set of 7 or 8 coasters, having tried numerous different set-ups, trying to eliminate the problem & am getting a bit fed up with it, especially as it was working fine the other day.

 

I've tried different cables & cable set-ups, copying the source data to a different location, buying Toast 8 & finally upgrading to 8.0.1 with no success.

 

The only thing that's changed is I ran out of discs on Friday & ordered a new batch of better quality discs that arrived on Saturday.

 

(I was using cheap discs but they wouldn't work on my LG DVD Recorder so I've just bought a batch of Verbatim DVD-Rs which is when the failures started.)

 

So I suppose my first question is should I expect my new 16x Verbatim discs to be problematic when my cheap unbranded 8x discs worked fine?

 

I'm running OS X 10.4.9 on a G4 PowerBook to an external LaCie Porsche external burner. (The burner comes up as "NEC DVD+-RW ND-6500A - Firewire" in the Toast window.)

 

I'm also running out of patience!

[lakewoodlawnman]

What speed are you burning at?

 

Could be the Nec doesn't like the 16x Verbatim with the firmware that it has.

[snowdog63]

What speed are you burning at?

 

Could be the Nec doesn't like the 16x Verbatim with the firmware that it has.

 

Well, on most attempts I had it set to "best" but on the last attempt I set it to "8x" because I figured that was the speed of my previous batch of discs so I thought that might work.

 

It was only when I saw the on screen feedback that's part of Toast 8 & found that I was only burning at 2x (that is, when writing to the internal burner set to "best" - the successful one) that I realised 8x may still be well out of range.

 

I decided to await feedback here before wasting another disc but burning with the external set to 2x was next on my list.

 

I couldn't find any firmware updates on the LaCie site or with a general web search. Not for the Mac, anyway.

[hermie54]

I have an internal NEC 3520AW and an external LaCie FW TsstCorp SHS-162L and both work just fine with Toast 8 using Verbatim 16x media. I even burned a Dual DVD-R last night without problems.

 

The Firmware on both drives is the latest available though. So check out the LaCie site Support ==> Downloads ==> DVD and if that won't help for your NEC their site as well. Chances are the LaCie download will flash the NEC, but you could also use NecFlash. Should still be on VersionTracker or MacUpdate.

[snowdog63]

Further to the above, I've managed to burn two discs successfully using the internal DVD Writer on the laptop so it's not a bad batch of media.