K3b problems with Track-At-Once (TAO)

I’ve had a lot of problems with my cd/dvd burner ever since I setup my current desktop. A while back I finally isolated the problem to burning in TAO mode instead of DAO/SAO. I’ve found that since upgrading to Kubuntu 8.04 the problem persists. I have not found a way to configure K3b to only use DAO/SAO and for K3b “Auto” mode seems to always mean TAO. So I have to change the mode each time I burn a CD. I’m not sure if this is a hardware or software problem but it is frustrating.

The drive is a Samsung Writemaster identified by the following:

Vendor: TSSTcorp
Description: CD/DVDW SH-S183L
Firmware: SB02

It appears as though the most recent firmware is SB03 released Jan 24, 2008.

When a disc is written in TAO mode it gets IO errors when the disc is read. Here is what a test looks like for the same burn on the same disc:

TAO

• md5sum /dev/sr0
  • md5sum: /dev/sr0: Input/output error

DAO

• md5sum /dev/sr0
  • 507077c51efe4c276227c05f8d41b768 /dev/sr0