Infrastructure Software

I'm experiencing general weirdness trying to write CD's and DVD's using a new internal DVD-RW device -- It's a Sony NEC AD 7220 A CD / DVD RW drive on a Solaris 10 x86 AMD system. I have searched far and wide for other threads of similar instances but no one has posted an issue like the one I'm having.

I have a Sony Optiarc AD 7220 A CD-RW on a x86 AMD Athalon 1.6 ghz based server with 2 GB RAM.

The DVD-RW drive gets detected by BIOS (Phoenix TrustedCore 2.3) and reads disks fine. I installed Solaris 10.08 from DVD using this DVD-RW drive.

However, trying to write to new blank media does not work properly, (effectively at all).

I've tried different brands of brands of blank CD's and CD-R and CD+R (have not tried using CD-RW disks yet). Ditto with DVD's - tried DVD-R and DVD+R's.

1. Inside the Solaris 10 GUI (Gnome, a.k.a. Java Desktop), when I put in a blank CD-R, a dialog box "Format Media...?" pops up. If I click "Ok" it formats the blank CD and closes the session, CD has been written to and is ruined.

2. I open a terminal window, as root, and put in a blank CD. "mkisofs –r /home/foo 2>/dev/null | cdrw –i –p 1" will write a directory tree OK, but if I go back into gnome GUI and open and close the CD tray, again, up pops the "Format Media..." dialog box instead of the CD appearing on the desktop. If I restart vold (svcadm restart volfs) then open and close the CD tray, voila, the contents appear on desktop as CD icon.

3. When I try to write to a DVD-R: "cdrw -i /local/iso_image" It always fails with: Write Track 1....Failed. after a few minutes. It did in fact write part of the .iso but bails out with a failure.

I've tried various other write commands (specifying the device ID, speed, so on and so forth) and command line switch options (following the rules of course) and it seems to me to be more than a syntax / media issue. However if it is I would like to know. I did see a similar CDRW device on the HCL for OpenSolaris with a 'reported to work' rating. That was for a Optiarc AD-5200A, which is going away thus my company has chosen to use the AD 7220A in speciality racks we build and deliver to the U.S. Navy.

I really need to get a handle on this CD-RW device issue and decide if a different brand / model is what it's going to take to solve this and move on to producing and delivering these systems in working conditions.