Problems burning discs with Toast

All I needed to do was to connect the Asus CD writer to a powered USB socket. When I first bought it I connected both USB plugs to the sockets on the back of my iMac which supplied the power which worked fine, then I rearranged my desk and connected them to a USB hub which was not powered without realising my mistake. Problem solved!

That error is a response being received from the drive, by Toast. That means that the drive has reported specific class (key) and type (code) error. In this case, involving a class of errors arising with the recording medium, and the specific error being returned is a write error. This means that the write failed. Why the write failed is not returned — neither the drive nor Toast particularly knows that.

Apply the current patches for your version of Toast, if you're not already current. This can fix incompatibilities with specific sorts of recording media and with how certain drives work. There's a lot more variability here both with media and with drives than most folks realize. Try a recording different drive. Try different media — an entirely different brand, preferably. Try an optical-media cleaning disk. Dusty heads can cause these sorts of errors. Definitely try recording at the lowest speed that the device and medium will allow, too.

Then — if the above fails — please report the problem and the specific recording media being used (there can be recording-related settings data present on optical media, data which is intended to help the drive adapt to the specific media), and the specific model of optical drive, to the folks at Roxio.

Defragging disks and tech tools and the rest are probably not relevant here, unfortunately. (I don't recall off-hand if a failure to get data to the disk fast enough — what defragmenting is intended to address — shows as a write error or not, but I wouldn't bet on there being any sane matching with any of the optical device errors. Optical drives are sketchy and semi-unreliable devices in general, no two firmware revisions of optical drives ever respond the same and sometimes not even two drives with the same firmware revision, optical drives get increasingly sketchy with age, and the optical media itself can be marvelously flaky. This from having written more than a little optical-recording software.)

Could be due to poor or faulty media. Verbatim, Maxell and Taiyo Juden DVD-R are the brands most recommended here.

Also, use a slow burn speed of 2x or 4x.

Klaus1 wrote:

Also, use a slow burn speed of 2x or 4x.

FWIW, many of the recent optical drives won't allow speeds anywhere near that slow, depending on the particular drive and the medium loaded. I have some combinations that won't drop below 12x, using standard tools.

When I started burning CDRs, a good many years ago, I got a lot of these errors. At one time I was getting a 40% failure rate. I had started by burning at a low speed - 2 times or possibly it was even real time for audio disks - and still got errors. I then upped it to the highest speed available - probably only 8 x at that time - and the failure rate dropped dramatically. I concluded that it wasn't so much a failure to keep up that was causing the problem, but that the slow speed gave that much longer for something to go wrong. I also settled on TDK blanks after a number of experiments.

Nowadays I don't get any problems at all burning at the highest available rate with an external (Apple) drive or with the built in drive in my older iMac. Drives can be a bit touchy about the make, so it's worth trying different ones.

Swap it. Barring a fuzzball somewhere obvious or something of that ilk, the slot loaders — and optical drives in general — are usually more effort and cost to repair than — once you have the box open — to just replace the drive. There are instructions posted around the 'net, if you are interested in pursuing the repair or the replacement yourself.