I burn off quite a few CDs and DVDs as backups of my work, and although I have previously used Nero I switched to ImgBurn a while back – it’s a free application unlike Nero, which costs an arm and a leg and is capable of filling an entire 1TB hard drive with crap during the installation process if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Recently, I started getting disk verification (initially) and power area calibration error messages (PACE). This was occurring with high-quality Verbatim disks, and on a clean installation of Windows 7 as well as an older one (my primary hard disk is partitioned for dual-booting).
I tried Nero again and it wouldn’t burn either. Everything pointed to the laser being on the way out on my optical drive – except that I have two of them, both Sony Optiarcs, and both were producing the same errors.
I did a bit of searching and it seems that this PACE message is quite common. Unfortunately, a solution was harder to find because, as is usual with the Internet, there is a hell of a lot of crap out there!
The worst solution I found was based on the advice that some optical disks, some optical disk drives, and some combinations of settings within ImgBurn (and so all burning software by implication) are mutually incompatible, so you would need to modify about a hundred different settings in the hope of finding the right combination. What nonsense!
However, I did eventually find a comment among all the melodramatic crap which suddenly made me go “a-ha!”
To cut a long story short, I went out and bought a DVD lens cleaner. I ran it on each optical drive and the change was immediately and dramatically apparent. As I write this I have actually run it five times on each drive – the small brush on the disk is noticeably dirty as a result.
When you stop and think, the average computer needs cleaning out at least once a year and often more frequently. This is especially true if you keep it in a bedroom (like mine) or dusty workplace. The optical drives are not sealed so some of that rubbish just has to get inside them and settle out on the laser lenses.
The PACE message relates to the fact that optical drives have to do a power test before they start burning, and carry on executing that test (called the running optimum power calibration, ROPC) as they burn. It is the drive itself which controls these, but the burning software has to trigger it.
In my case, all the stuff about firmware upgrades and tinkering with settings was obviously rubbish because both drives had been working perfectly – and both stopped working at roughly (but not exactly) the same time. There was the possibility that both had started to expire and were in their death throes, but that would still have been a coincidence.
If you have this problem, try cleaning your DVD lens first – and before doing anything dramatic, especially if it was all working fine before. You may have a dead optical drive – but it might just be dirty and in need of a clean.
Also on the subject of errors when using ImgBurn, if you get a lot of verification errors it is worth running a RAM test. Faulty RAM might be giving you problems.