Re: How do I know if my CD writer is dying.

cga2000 staggered into the Black Sun and said:
my sole means of backup, an HP M820 external CD writer (SCSI/pcmcia)
no longer works as reliably as it used to. The wodim cdrecord
replacement hangs just before it says "fixating" .. and eventually
barfs a million error messages

Install cdrecord (or growisofs) and try that, just to make sure it's not
a hardware problem. Joerg keeps saying wodim has bugs. He might
have a point there.

I have a feeling this has nothing to do with pcmcia or scsi
configuration, or a bug in wodim that would affect just my particular
hardware, but [is] a symptom of this 5-year old device gently dying.
Is there any way I could confirm this before I replace it?

See above, and take a look at dmesg's output. You *might* see sensible
error messages if this is an actual SCSI device and you have verbose
SCSI error reporting turned on. If it's IDE or USB, the odds of
sensible error messages go down, but you might see something useful in
the dump.

Do CD writers just die and [then] you have to buy another one, or
[are] there ways to give them a second life?

This depends on what exactly has failed. Certain problems can
apparently be fixed by fiddling with the laser power level, but problems
with the mechanical parts typically mean it's time to replace the drive.
The last CD-RW drive that died on me (2.5 years after the warranty
expired, much longer than any other CD-RW I'd owned, yay Plextor)
displayed complete and total catatonia. YDriveMV.

--
The squirrels now live in fear of the magic exploding compost heap.
--Dan Holdsworth
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
.