Hi.

I am going slowly mad trying to find a way of making a Sony DW-G120A DVD-RAM drive actually WORK with DVD-RAM media! For no good reason I can find, DVD-RAM requires specific drivers under windows, and as far as I can tell such drivers don't exist for sony drives. So, the drive is useless.

In theory it will work as a fat32 device under XP, but there are two problems with this: I'm not running XP, and FAT32 is a terrible choice of filesystem for 4+GB media.

Does anyone have any ideas about how the hell I make this damn drive work under Win2K, or do I just throw it away and give up on the idea of making reliable backups?

pca

The Wikipedia page claims you can get Nero InCD to solve your problem. Google also turned up another option that might work for you.

Prices on DVD-RAM media seem to range from $4-$10 per 10GB disk. To get 500GB of storage, that means you're paying $200, minimum. This contrasts with external USB hard drive, where (according to NewEgg), you can get a 500GB disk + USB enclosure for $250. It's a lot easier to handle one big USB disk than 50 DVD-RAM cartridges.

in cd sucks with dvd ram. I kept putting the disc in protected mode because it thought the disc was dirty. These were discs that were put in once and ejected when they were full.

Panasonic used to make a special driver for DVD-RAM but it is usually not included any more. If your stuck in the format then you'll probably have to use fat 32 or in cd .

If your stuck with DVD-RAM then you have no choice .

Yes, InCD will, as far as I can tell, solve the problem, but it causes more problems than it solves. it's a really dire piece of software.

500GB of DVD-RAM would certainly not be cheap, but a) I don't need anything like that amount of storage for important backups, 40-50GB is more like it, and b) DVD-RAM is probably the most reliable form of storage currently on the market and affordable.

The disks are good for 30+ years of data retention, and 100K+ write/erase cycles. This isn't just marketing balls, either. A friend of mine has used DVD-RAM for multiple daily backups at work for the last 10 years, with the same set of disks, which still work perfectly! That's more than can be said of the hard drives used in the computers that have been backed up. When they started, of course the drives were £3000 each, plus media at nearly £100 a disk...

I have finally found a method of making it work. It was simply:

Get a modified drive flasher program
Get a copy of the firmware for the Liteon drive the Sony one is based on.
Reflash the drive with this firmware
Download the panasonic DVD-RAM drivers
Modify the DVDRAM.INF file with the correct data for the now Liteon drive
Install the drivers
Reboot
Uninstall them again because something went wrong
Reboot
Reinstall them once more
Reboot
Wait for all the new hardware to be found
Reboot
Job done!

Easy. Whoever said that windows was difficult to work with

Then, of course, I discovered that the Liteon/Sony drive doesn't like Maxell media. Guess what I had? Pretty much all of the DVD-RAM media available easily is preformatted as UDF2.0, which is for video/audio in standalone DVD recorders and camcorders. It doesn't work correctly with data files in a PC. So you have to reformat the disks as either FAT32 (2GB file limit) or UDF1.5. For some reason the Maxell disks won't successfully format as anything but UDF2.0. No idea why.

So I went out and bought a 10-pack of panasonic disks, which are pretty cheap at £18 the pack. I have found that about 7 of them would happily reformat as UDF1.5 with no problems. The rest, oddly, would only work if I reformatted as FAT32 first, then UDF1.5, or they gave an error right at the end of the 40-minute process. Again, no idea why.

Once they're formatted, they seem to work perfectly. I'm going to completely fill a couple of them and run some data integrity tests, because it's still possible that there is a hardware/firmware/driver problem that's causing this odd behaviour, but from what I've learned it's more likely to just be windows being awkward about reliably running the formatting program. It seems to be a little buggy. At one point it crashed for no obvious reason, and the mouse pointer on the middle monitor of my 3-head machine vanished! It was there on the other two, just not the middle one

As I type this I have realised that the disk formatting seems to die most often if I'm using the machine while it's doing the format. When I leave it alone it usually works, if I'm browsing the web or something like that it fails about 60% of the time. Multitasking? I've heard of that somewhere, I wonder where?

Did I mention I really hate computers? Or maybe it's just ones with an OS...

pca

This was pre PC, actually. They were using them on Acorn RiscPC and A440 machines as SCSI drives, storing large amount (at the time, of course) of medical data and software which was frequently updated. It was a medical research establishment and secure reliable backup was worth the cost of three or four £3k drives and a few hundred quid of disks (1 pack of ten!).

The format has stayed the same all this time, and the data is still readable. The disks have outlasted the original machines, and their replacements, and the replacements for those They even have a couple of the original drives still working.

Expensive, yes, but quality expensive.

pca

I had so many head aches with DVD-RAM . Replacing a broken drive with a newer drive is difficult. I don't know much about reliability, but Win98 and DVD-RAM is just as bad. I gave up and ended up using fat 32, just cause IN CD sucked so much.