To all potential buyers of the HP dvd300e BEWARE. I rendered two brand new dvd300e's useless when incorrectly burning DVDs. I think this is caused by faulty firmware on the drives. Here is my account of trying to use this DVD+R/RW burner with Linux:
I obtained my first drive for Christmas 2003. As soon as I could I began playing with it with my Linux laptop running a custom 2.4.22-18mdk kernel for my laptop specifics and WG511 802.11g driver support. I had no success with firewire initially, but as soon as I plugged the DVD burner into USB2.0 it showed up beautifully. With some playing, I was able to rip an Audio CD with grip, burn a CD-R with gnome-toaster, and watch a DVD movie with mplayer all with minimal effort. If this is all you want out of the drive STOP here. But if you're like me you actually want to burn DVD's read on. I was aware there were firmware updates available on HP's support FTP, but assumed because this was a brand new drive, no updates were necessary. Additionally, because I did not have access to a Windows PC I did not update the firmware on the first DVD I had. I had many problems trying to use dvd+rw-format with DVD+R media for what I now know are obvious reasons. As soon as a put a DVD+RW disc inside the drive and ran dvd+rw-format /dev/scd0 I got further, but the disc failed formatting after only 2 minutes. (Can't remember the exact error) I tried running a script I found for burning a bunch of mpg files to a video DVD format and after that my dvd burner was toast. The following script was run: ### \begin create_dvd.sh ### #!/bin/csh # # Burn a DVD from a set of MPEG files # Note: Uses disk bookmark resetting to fool some dumb players # # Input: # 1-255: MPEG files to be chapters of DVD # dvddirgen -o tmp_dvd -r dvdauthor -o tmp_dvd $argv dvdauthor -o tmp_dvd -T dvd+rw-format -force /dev/scd0 dvd+rw-booktype -dvd-rom-spec -unit+rw /dev/scd0 growisofs -speed=1 -dvd-compat -overburn -Z /dev/scd0 -R -udf -dvd-video tmp_dvd rm -rf tmp_dvd ### \end create_dvd.sh ### I didn't have any disc in the drive (oops), so lots of the commands complained about "No Medium Found". I was left with a dvd300e which just blinked it's single LED activity light continuously, the eject button didn't eject the tray, unplugging the USB cables made no change, and removing power and re-applying power just brought the drive back to the same "Blinkey" state. I believe the failure was caused by the dvd+rw-booktype command. I can't verify this, but this is my gut feeling right now. I packed up all the cable and manuals, got the receipt and got a replacement unit from Office Max. The very first thing I did was to upgrade the firmware of the dvd300e to version 3.00. From Windows XP everything looked pretty good. I then plugged the External DVD-Writer into my Linux Laptop via USB2.0 and was success at burning data to the DVD+RW (Rewritable) media which came with the box. Writing the data involved formatting and using `growisofs`. $ dvd+rw-format /dev/scd0 $ growisofs -dvd-compat -overburn -Z /dev/scd0 -R -udf Pictures/ Everything went smoothly. I was able to mount the DVD and read the information just fine. I packed up the laptop and drive to bring it home. At home I wanted to burn some data to an HP branded DVD+R media. I first set the book-type to dvd+r spec with $ dvd+rw-booktype -dvd+r-spec -unit+r /dev/scd0 *BLINKEY BLINKEY* $ growisofs -dvd-compat -overburn -Z /dev/scd0 -R -udf tmp/ > Failed burning. Again, the drive is toast. It exhibits the exact same behavior as the first failed drive. I was left with a dvd300e which just blinked it's single LED activity light continuously, the eject button didn't eject the tray, unplugging the USB cables made no change, and removing power and re-applying power just brought the drive back to the same "Blinkey" state. I sat on the phone on hold waiting for HP Support for 30 minutes, only to be told to take the unit back to where I bought it after I explained the situation. So I took the second drive back to Office Max. I didn't get a replacement, but I'm waiting for better firmware, or tools which don't blow the firmware away. So given this story, I have come to this (possibly incorrect) conclusion that setting booktype on the hp dvd300e blows the firmware up. Any suggestions or recommendations are welcome. -- Joshua Norige <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
