SUMMARY When I try to burn a DVD or Blu-ray in K3b using a portable USB connected LG WP40NB30 drive, the burn process does not start. K3b gets stuck in a loop trying to "Unlock the drive". The drive just repeatedly makes a clicking sound for ever. I cancel the burn and the error message "unable to unlock drive" appears in K3b. The drive is recognized by K3b and correctly reports when blank media is loaded. The drive does play back discs using other programs such as VLC on this linux system and successfully burns discs on my Mac OS systems using Toast software. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. connect USB drive and create burn project in K3b. 2. load blank media 3. click "Burn" OBSERVED RESULT Burn does not start and must be canceled EXPECTED RESULT SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Windows: macOS: Linux/KDE Plasma: Linux Mint 20 (available in About System) KDE Plasma Version: ? KDE Frameworks Version: ? Qt Version: ? ADDITIONAL INFORMATION K3b disc burning does work on this system with an internal(SATA interface)LG DVD only drive. Just the USB blu-ray drive does not burn. The computer is a desktop with an AMD processor and ASUS motherboard. Same result with the dive connected to either the USB 2 or USB 3 ports. Thanks in advance for your advice.
Does growisofs work? e.g. growisofs -speed=1 -Z /dev/sr1=big-image.iso
Thanks for your suggestion. I did get it to work twice with growisofs and also experienced the same problem once with growisofs. And similarly, I did get it to work once from K3b, and afterwards had the same problem again many times. So far I have not be able to isolate the conditions that make success or failure repeatable.
After experimenting with numerous cables and USB ports, I have concluded that the problems I experienced with this drive on this system are hardware related. I will simply replace the drive with an internal SATA interface device. No further efforts are needed on your part. Thank you for what you did and the lesson learned seems to be that the USB interface can be problematic for devices that rely on it for power. Thanks again.
Since you have a desktop computer, an internal SATA drive is better, especially if you want to do disc burning. From [1]: > It’s an interesting question to ask, as historically, my experience > with slim type drives is for very poor write quality especially at > higher speeds because the Z-CLV strategy creates step-wise changes > in burn quality with issues very common around speed transitions. [1] https://goughlui.com/2014/07/31/review-panasonicmatsushita-uj240-6x-slim-sata-blu-ray-writer/