[CS-FSLUG] ISO Image Quality & Burn Speeds

[Don Parris]

On Tue, 9 Aug 2005 10:57:01 -0600
"Nathan T." <celerate at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm finding this thread stranger and stranger.
> 
> I have a Plextor burner and an LG CD/DVD+- burner, with both of them I
> can burn CDs at the highest speeds (40 on the first, and 48 or 50 on
> the second) and still get an apparently perfect burn, the CDs work
> perfectly and never develop problems.
> 
> Now we have this thread which sounds like something I might have heard
> 8 years ago, where CD burners are no longer considered reliable above
> speeds of 8x and everyone's burner is so unreliable that they can only
> burn some brands of CDs with them. Is the situation really this bad
> with everyone's CD/DVD burners? If so then why don''t mine have any of
> these problems?
> 
> _______________________________________________

Who knows?  I can burn a simple data CD at max speed, and I can access the
data.  When I burn an installation ISO at 24x or higher, I keep getting
error messages during the installation.  This occurred with 3 different ISO
images.  When I slowed it down to 16x, it worked beautifully - and on a
second box.  I previously tried to re-use a Morphix ISO image to install to
another box, but the same kinds of errors that I now see kept cropping up. 

What you're seeing may actually be relevant (albeit from a different
perspective) - the boxes I install on are old 450MHz HP Vectras.  Their CD
players may, in fact be those old ones that are not capable of handling much
faster than 16x.  These boxes are at least 5 years old.  I'm not sure about
the speed capacity of these CD-ROM drives, but probably about the same as
the lady's 24x drive that I'm working with.

I won't swear to it, but I'm willing to bet that, if a CD-ROM drive is rated
at 24x, it can probably display data burned faster than that, but can't
handle the installation ISO image burned at higher speeds.  

What caused me a problem was burning 4-5 CDs and not having any success with
the installation.  If I hadn't seen the "burn your image at a slower rate"
message, I'd probably have given up trying to make it happen.  I was totally
unaware of the implications of burning CDs at certain speeds, and whether it
could/would cause any problems.

Kelly's advice might still be wise.  However, I would hope that a CD burner
capable of burning CD-R at 24x could burn a reliable ISO image at 16x.  It
seems to have proven true in my case.  I used the same CD to successfully
install Ubuntu on a 300MHz box and a 450MHz box.  I've learned a lot from
this thread.

That said, I appreciate everyone's input.  This has been educational!

Don
-- 
evangelinux    GNU Evangelist
http://matheteuo.org/                   http://chaddb.sourceforge.net/
"Free software is like God's love - you can share it with anyone anytime
anywhere."