Mageia forum

Hi,
Can anyone tell me if it is possible to get Mageia to read and write DVD-RAM disks using my Samsung SE-S204 DVD drive?
Thanks.

There's nothing special to a DVD-RAM, and there shouldn't be anything that prevents you from doing so.
I used to make backups of some files on my parents box to a DVD-RAM, and don't remember there being an issue.
Did you try it yet? You should be able to do that with e.g. the KDE LiveDVD, if you write it to USB and boot from that.

I've tried using the drive but the disks are simply not registering in either Xfburn or K3b although DVD-R still works fine.

Mageia is installed as my primary OS and dual boots with Uberstudent, both of which are kept up to date and neither read the DVD-RAM disks.

If I go into Xfburn Preferences | Devices and click Scan for devices the drive flashes as it accesses the disk but nothing is detected (it's a similar thing in K3b). The disks appear on the left of the Files manager listed as MEI_UDF and properties indicate 4.6GB free space.

I'll try to take a look at the weekend, there may have been some issue with udf support in the meantime ...
Please ping me next week if I don't reply

Problems with DVD readers are common. Also, some brands of DVD-R are not easily read by some brands of DVD readers. You might try changing to a different brand of DVD-R and see if that helps.

Thanks jiml8, but the issue isn't with DVD-R disks, which do work, it is purely to do with DVD-RAM disks.

FWIW, just tested again this weekend and seems there's an issue with writing DVD-RAM disks.
Tried with k3b, the backup written on the DVD-RAM is recognised, it also recognises it as DVD-RAM.

When trying to write a new disk, k3b will query to insert a valid disk. Also the dropdown menu is refreshing each two seconds or so,
switching between "no media found" to "insert a valid medium" or something like that - just a quick translation out of my memory.

I don't think it's the UDF support from the kernel, more likely to do with disk detection/polling via udisks (which might explain the flashin dropdown menu)
or some missing patch in dvd-rw-tools.

Also tried via brasero, but as it's a GNOME program it doesn't seem to provide means to show information about the inserted media,
it simply refuses to continue stating that there's no compatible media inserted. But basically it's the same result as with k3b.

Didn't have time to investigate further.

Thanks for looking into it, I'll stick to DVD-Rs for now and look into again after the stable version 6 is released.

Well, usually issues don't fix themselves, so it would probably be the best idea to open a bugreport against Mageia 5, see https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_report_a_bug_properly
For completeness's sake and also to allow others to follow up on that bug report, please also post the link to it here in the thread, thanks.

For reference, bugreport is https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18252

Just did a further test, and after loading the kernel module pktcdvd for packet writing and then mounting the DVD-RAM with

Code: Select all

mount -t udf -o rw,noatime,async,users /dev/pktcdvd/dvdram /media/dvdram

I can normally write to the DVD-RAM as a regular harddisk as expected. Maybe you should try that, too.

I don't know if this relevant in your case, but I add it anyway - for reflection.

Although I have never used AcetoneISO (for manipulating an ISO image on disk) I had a looksee to consider it's worth. In the Help manual there is a small section discussing "mounting" (the image). In order to mount, the User must be included to a "fuse" group, otherwise "no worky". So I thought, perhaps, there may be an underlying "permission" requirement in the RAM-DVD setup too?

[As an aside, I have noticed that some CLI commands do not function - unless I "su" first - so it is something that catches me out from time to time.]

Just a thought.