"the burn failed because of a medium write error"

everyone seems to be saying to tone down the burn speed, the problem i am having is trying to burn a dual layer dvd with a set burn speed. when i put the disc in and access the burn options, the speed is set at 2.4 and greyed out so it can't be changed, the first time i burned the image i used toast, which burned fine, but won't read. 2nd and 3rd time i used disk utility, which failed with the burn failed medium write errors both times, i even tried converting the iso to a dmg to burn it, neither worked. now i've chewed a bunch of dl dvds which are fairly expensive. not happy.

are there any other things we can try? im fairly sure it's not my drive thats the problem, i only got my laptop back from apple 3 days ago and they replaced the drive and a bunch of other faulty hardware. but i haven't had a successful burn yet.

I'm having this same issue, I slowed it down to 24x and it's working...but this needs to be fixed because it's super annoying!!!!!!!!

Me, too. G5 Mac running 10.4.11

I'm using the Burn application, see http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net because a year or more ago I started having issues, the Finder wouldn't launch its own burning application when I installed a fresh disc, so I installed Burn as a workaround.

I was getting sporadic "medium write error" failures in iTunes 8. Downloaded Burn and just got the same error.

Hi all,

I haven't read through all 4 pages of this thread but have recently been experiencing burn failures because of a "medium write error" as well.

Thankfully, last night I was able to overcome the error. As may have been mentioned in this thread and in others, the error can be caused by the quality of the media you are using.

I had been using Sony DVD+R discs (blue packaging, bought at staples) without any problem for almost year when I first encountered the error while burning tivo transfers with Popcorn 3. After reading the boards, I've sprayed some compressed air into my superdrive (was as gentle as could be), repaired my permissions and switched media to Verbatim. I bought Verbatim discs from best buy that have the movie reels printed on them. Tried out the discs last night and they worked fine. I was reluctant to think that something as stupid as media quality would be causing the problem.

If you've tried those steps and are still getting an error, you may need a new superdrive. In my experience, try to use a independent, but authorized, repair center as opposed to the Genius Bar.