Help! Does anyone have a fully functioning Sony NEC AD 7220 A CD / DVD RW drive on a Solaris 10 x86 AMD system? I have a Sony Optiarc AD 7220 A CD-RW on a x86 (AMD Athalon 1.6 ghz, 2 GB RAM). It gets detected by BIOS (Phoenix TrustedCore 2.3) and reads disks fine. I installed Solaris 10.08 from a DVD using this drive. However, trying to write to new blank media does not work properly, or at all. 1. Inside the Solaris 10 GUI (Gnome, a.k.a. Java Desktop), when I put in a blank CD-R, a dialog box "Format Media...?" pops up. If I click "Ok" it formats the blank CD and closes the session, CD ruined. 2. I open a terminal window, as root, and put in a blank CD. mkisofs –r /home/foo 2>/dev/null | cdrw –i –p 1will write a directory tree OK, but if I go back into gnome GUI and open and close the CD tray, again, up pops the "Format Media..." dialog box instead of the CD appearing on the desktop. If I restart vold (svcadm restart volfs) then open and close the CD tray, voila, the contents appear on desktop as CD icon. 3. When I try to write to a DVD+R: cdrw -i /local/iso_image It always fails with: Write Track 1....Failed. after a few minutes. It did in fact write part of the .iso but bails out with a failure. Also, writing to a

This problems with DVD writing on Solaris 10 x86 is a SCSI issue where the DVD-RW drive is IDE and has an IDE to SCSI bridge. Direct IDE writes to same device work fine. Here are more details (I left out an explanation of an important configuration of the system) 1. The system having the problems is SCSI 320 based (Solaris 10 x86 u6) 2. There is an IDE to SCSI bridge (acard 7722) on the Sony NEC Optiarc AD 7220-A DVD RW drive 3. It reads from DVD, and CD's fine (all flavors of - and +, not blueray of course) 4. It can only write to CD reliably 5. Once in a while (just enough to instill false hope) it does write successfully to DVD-R 6. Never writes to DVD-RW or DVD+R 7. 98% of the time fails to write to any DVD (using cdrw, cdrecord or growisofs) I found out it is an issue with the Sony Optiarc drive. I swithed to a different brand and get different results! 1. Same SCSI system (with IDE bridge) 2. DVD-RW drive is a NEC 3550-A DVD 3. Reads from CD and DVD no problem 4. Writes to CD AND DVD's including DVD-RW !! (from command line using cdrw and growisofs) 5. Has problem using Gnome write-to-cd when a .iso is right clicked on and target is DVD-RW and needs blanking first (erase check box not working on DVD-RW) 6. Stupid 'Gnome Media Format' dialog box still pops up when blank CD-R is inserted. Pressing OK still ruins a blank CD-R I also tried a LG GH22 DVD-RW drive on the IDE to SCSI bridge and it works for the most part, although with slightly different results than the NEC 3550-AD. Also worth noting is I detached the Optiarc AD 7220 from SCSI and hooked directly to IDE and it works OK for the most part. So this problem appears to manifest only when that drive is on a IDE to SCSI bridge. I tried all kinds of SCSI ID and speed settings, as well as turning off vold and other services I thought could have an effect, but nothing really works except getting a different brand DVD-RW drive or hooking that one up to IDE (not really an option for my deliverable product though).