I bought a stack of CD/RW (Memorex) discs to use on an old laptop on which Ubuntu 11.10 is installed. The CD device that I have does not read DVDs, so I had to get CDs. I had no problem using most of the discs as RW (I did not have to format them, they worked straight out of the box for read, write and rewrite), however there are a couple of the discs that Ubuntu can't detect. The CD drive accesses the discs and shows that a device is mounted and ready to use, however they are read only. I can't even format them on Ubuntu. I took one of the offending CDs to a Vista system and it could see the disc. A ROXIO popup asked if I wanted it BLANK. I selected yes and it said it was being formatted. The format completed successfully. I was not given a choice of format type, however when I put the CD back into the laptop, Ubuntu seen it as read only, which means it is still unusable. What happened here? Why would a CD/RW be read only? Is there something that I can do to reset these CD/RW discs to RW? Read only is useless on a blank CD.
It's simply a matter of permissions. This should be in the Unix section. You may not have the correct rights to use the burner. In windows, you're given permission to do what you want with what you want. In Linux, each thing (file/folder/device/etc....) can be owned by a user, a group, or a group of groups/users. Open terminal and type or paste ls -l /dev/sr0 Next type in terminal groups to make sure you are in the right group (optical) Then post the output of both the above commands so that someone can check it.
In my personal experience CDs are highly unreliable and it also depends a lot on your CD ROM. actually. Also some cd roms will work so nice and some will drive you crazy
Tnx guys for responding. I can read and write other CD/RW discs from my CDROM drive on Ubuntu. I have moved files to and from them with drag and drop and using Barsero to burn CDs, so I know that the permissions are properly set for me to use them as RW. In a package of 10, 3 are READ only. Guess they left the factory defective. I will not be buying Memorex again (close to 30% of my investment down the drain).
Ocky, I have never heard of this brand, however if I do, I will give them a whirl. Thanks for the recommendation.
Hi emmjay, Try running the cdrecord (in Ubuntu 10.10 or greater) command to blank the cd discs: 1) run the command: $ cdrecord --devices to find out the device name of your cd drive 2) To blank a cd disc: $ cdrecord -eject -v -force speed=4 blank=fast dev=/dev/scdx Alternatively, use all instead of fast for blank (takes longer) , and replace x with the device number from the 1) step 3) To record a cd disc: cdrecord -eject -v speed=4 dev=/dev/scdx ./ubuntu-11.04-desktop-i386.iso where the .iso file is in the current directory -- Tom
Tnx Tom ... this looks involved! You have gone to a lot of trouble to help me resurrect 3 RW discs, so your effort demands some additional effort on my part. It is a 3 day holiday weekend here, so I'll give it a try next week and see how it goes. Tnx again.
