Error reading PMA? Help!

[Bhairav]

I bought a spindle of 25 Moser Baer India Pro 52X CD-Rs yesterday. These had worked well earlier on my 52246S, so I bought them again. System hardware is the 52246S, mounted as secondary slave on my motherboard. Mobo is the Asus A7N8X-X, NForce 2 chipset, using the latest drivers from Asus (1.16).

Software used was Nero 6.0.0.11. I tried to burn 700 MB in DAO onto these discs, @ 40X. Lead-in time was VERY long, but I kept waiting. The drive kept spinning up and down, with lead-in @ 22%. Then it all stopped, and gave me this error: "Error reading from PMA. Burn process aborted."
PMA is the Program Memory Area on the disc, and I found from http://www.hival.com/CD-RW-faqs.htm#6 that "
"6. Error reading the Table of Contents (TOC) or Program Memory Area (PMA) from the CD.


Do not try and write to this CD. It has serious problems, and may have been damaged during a previous write. If this is a CD-RW media, erase it and try again."

I tried in TAO, and I got a write failure. This has happened on 3 discs so far. However, I took a disc to a friend's house. He has Nero 5.5.10.42. I burned a disc @ 40X, but it was VERY slow.. took 10 minutes.

Does this mean that the entire batch of discs is bad? I've had good experiences with MBI in the past, but hey, if these don't work, the vendor has agreed to take them back.

Do let me know what you guys think.
TIA,
Bhairav.


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[Bhairav]

Okay, update on the situation.I'm typing this from my friend's house, on my machine. Just burned 700 MB in TAO. Selected a burn speed of 40X, and enabled the real-time speed display. The disc took 4-5 minutes for lead-in and then the burn started. The speed stayed @ 12X for the entire duration of the burn! The CD-Doctor scan @ 52X was very good (as is to be expected!). C1: Min 0, Max 8 and Avg 0.499! No C2 errors.
Does this look like a bad batch of media to you guys?

[CDRecorder]

It does sound like bad media to me. I'd recommend taking it back.

BTW, what CD-RW drive does your friend have?

[Bhairav]

Oh, I'm sorry I didn't clarify that. I took my entire machine to his place, because he had a copy of Nero 5.5.10.42 I could use. I'm leaning toward the bad media theory too. Let's see.. it's 10:30 PM here right now , so I'll have to wait until tomorrow.
Thanks for the advice.
Bhairav.

[CDRecorder]

You're welcome. I hope I was able to help!

BTW, you probably already knew this, but the Lead-In should never take 4-5 minutes, even at 12x. Unless your CD-RW drive is going bad, there's almost certainly a problem with the media.

[Bhairav]

Yep, that's why I'm leading toward the "bad media" theory. Just before opening the spindle of the MBI discs, I had burned 4 Verbatim DLP discs at their rated speeds of 16X. Those burns were fine, completed in about 4m35s, which pretty much corresponds to the 16X speed. One thing I can't figure out, is that Nero 6 will not work with these discs, while Nero 5 will. Weird.