don't leave your CD-Rs on the windowsill!

[baratron]

On Saturday night, I was trying to run off a CD for jaxom, but my CD burner was not co-operating. The first CD I ran off was mostly ok, but the sound on the last few tracks was a bit choppy. It was annoying to listen to, so I did another one - but that one was worse. So I did another one - and that was even worse! There wasn't anything physically wrong with the discs that I could see, and I'd already used about 20 CDs from the stack of 100 without any problems. We had no idea what was going wrong - dirt in the CD burner maybe? So we cleaned out the CD burner, and ran off another disc at a lower write speed - and it was still choppy. Gah.

Eventually, Richard came up with a hypothesis that the discs had been damaged because they were sitting on the windowsill, and CD-Rs don't like bright light or heat. We used a CD from the bottom of the pile, and that one recorded with no problems.

So now I have a stack of 70-odd CD-Rs, some of which will record perfectly and some of which won't, and I have no idea how far down the stack I need to go to get undamaged discs. How utterly frustrating. And entirely unconnected to this, the linux kernel on Richard's machine keeps telling him his printer port is on fire. I'm serious - it keeps giving the error message "lp0 on fire". I boggle.

Comments

there's something about that in the Sun man pages

[redbird]

At least on some old versions of SunOS, the manual page for "fasthalt" explained that this was the appropriate command to issue if a disk was on fire. It didn't say anything about printer ports, though.

[mhw.livejournal.com]

Do a binary chop on the stack of CD-Rs. That's the fastest way to find the cutoff point.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

quite an old kernel then; more recent ones have the more useful message "invalid error status on lp0 (on fire, eh?)"

[mjl]

you haven't seen the "lp0 on fire" message before? apparently it's a unix joke that long pre-dates Linux... or so i was told when i first saw it...

as to the CD-Rs - would it not make sense to keep taking them from the bottom until you get to the dodgy ones? :)

[jaxom.livejournal.com]

And if you're really evil, you could work from the bottom until you find the iffy ones. Then buy a new load from a ripoff megastore of the same type, swap your dodgy ones for the new ones, take the iffy ones back and get a refund/replacement on them, 'because they keep burning bad copies'. Muhahaha.

[erik]

The computer system I started on (PLATO) had a joke command somewhere or other that was HCF: Halt and Catch Fire. Maybe this is the confirmation status one expects back from that...

[lovingboth]

Yep, like floppy disks, you have to read and obey the care instructions if you expect them to last...