Don’t Blame the Koala…
New OS versions sometimes bring confusing results, and this is one of those times.
I updated to Karmic last week and my USB DVD R/W drive acted like it wasn’t connected. I put in a disk to burn and nothing, nada, zilch. I opened Brasero and it would let me burn an ISO, but didn’t recognize the drive.
I searched the forums for errors in the automount sequence. No dice. Maybe there was a problem with the USB? Nope. Maybe a problem with Gnome? Don’t know. I found lots of questions, I wasn’t alone, but no answers.
With Intrepid and Jaunty I got used to popping in a cd/dvd and Ubuntu would open a dialog box asking what I wanted to do. Didn’t happen on Karmic. It was like the DVD drive wasn’t plugged in at all (checked that too).
Finally I read a post discussing a different problem (cross-posting at its best) and I got a hint.
… Blame Brasero
Turns out Brasero has somehow lost its connection to the optical drives. Slip in a blank CD and Brasero ignores it. Open Brasero manually and try to burn a CD, there’s no drive recognized. The answer was to install a different burner. I chose K3b CD and DVD Kreator. Get it at the command line:
apt-get install k3b
use synaptic, or download it here: K3b CD and DVD Kreator
Not the Final Answer
This is definitely a work around and I’m sure the Ubuntu team is hard at work on it. Ubuntu still doesn’t recognize blank media when its slipped into the drive, though it does recognize a disk that’s not empty. This isn’t very user friendly. If I put in a disk, I would expect some kind of notification that the disk was recognized, blank or not, so I don’t spend all day diagnosing what’s wrong with the drive. This was how it worked in Jaunty. As it stands now, I still don’t have that notification, but at least I’m not just stuck with a non-functional drive.
Bookmark This:
Comments