Unreliable CDR burns on Dell 4100/Sony CRX140E [Was: Smelly CDs?]

Okay, you asked for it! ;-) I can only agree -- which is why I'm
rather pissed off with this Dell 4100 running ME and Dell OEM ECDC
4.02d with a Sony CRX140E CD-RW drive. Been meaning to mention this
for some time now, so here goes...

I can usually get two or three good burns each boot-up before it clags
out again, invariably with the following errors:

T0100: I/O error (06/C5/00) - Write error - buffer underrun occurred
T0100: I/O error (06/C5/00) - Write error - buffer underrun occurred
T7127: TrackWriter error - Flush failed
T7118: TrackWriter error - Command retry failed

At the time the system decides the CD-R is stuffed it usually claims
"97% complete" (sometimes even "99% complete"). But when you inspect
the rejected CD-R it's clear it has only burnt a fraction of the
available space (e.g. 3 to 5 mm track width of the full 32(?) mm).

I've had the problem with several different brands (=>7) and dye
types, and it *may* be more common when making data CD copies than
writing from HDD to CD-R. (In the latter case I usually make a disk
image first; but the "copy" does that too, having only one drive.)

Strangely enough (and now touching all wood in sight I've never had
a problem with routine writing to CD-RWs and formatted CD-Rs using
DirectCD 3.01d_D5 which came with the other Dell stuff, and I do this
daily (but it's usually only 20 to 30 MB at a time as an XCOPY
operation from a DOS window).

In the absence of other likely culprits, I'm tending to blame Windows
ME (after all, it does get a lot of bad PR because I also have
problems with Windows Explorer working like it's crawling through
treacle after it's been used to list a few big directories (lots of
files rather than space used) and if this behaviour is let go for some
time (i.e.no reboot) it gets to the stage where screen windows take
*ages* to close down, as though there is a lot of behind the scenes
processing happening [no HDD activity though] or, perhaps, just some
timeout waiting to happen.

As said, it seems to happen whenever I've been accessing lots of
files; which includes copying, deleting, or simply just scrolling
through a long directory list. How many is "lots"? Well occasional
data directories have upwards of 2500 files, though nearly all would
be less than 500 and most much less than that. Backup CD-Rs would
usually contain between 4000 and 12000 files.


Cheers, Phred.