Windows Disk Image Burner

[Frida Kosofsky]

Im having an issue with an HP Pavilion quad-core system running Windows 7 Home Premium. Whenever I attempt to burn an .iso using Imgburn on this system, it hangs during the verification. The most recent episode stopped @ 7% verification complete and just sat there for 10 minutes with no progress.

If I remove these (as I've seen suggested elsewhere), will that "break" other software packages? I do have PowerISO installed and there is a CyberLink package installed that was part of the system as purchased.

The Lower Class Filter was still in place and the verification hung again. I'm seeing references on the net that the PxHlpa64 file may be part of a DRM or malware package. I'm hesitant to remove it with just the ImgBurn tool. Any suggestions?

I removed PowerISO and all of the Cyberlink software (I don't use the latter anyway). However, the filter remained after a reboot. Using ImgBurn's filter tool I attempted to remove the filter, but that didn't work - the filter remains.

You might find that Cyberlink used the Roxio engine (almost nobody writes their own!). Uninstalling that app wouldn't remove the filter driver because it could be used by any number of other applications. Maybe you can google 'uninstall px engine' for more info?

I tried removing with the Remove Filter button, the dialog went away and the filter was still in the list. Restarting ImgBurn had no effect. After removing it manually in the registry, it disappeared from the list.

However, when I wrote the last post, ImgBurn appeared to be verifying the disk without issue. Now it stops @ 82% complete and hangs. And the system itself still hangs after aborting ImgBurn's verification process. A hard reboot is necessary to recover the system.

For what it's worth, a Windows 7 Ultimate installation does not have a Sonic Shared directory in the Common Files area of either Program Files or Program Files (x86). It's something to do with Sonic's software, but I'm just lost as to what or how that might have been installed.

The more that I work on this issue the more I think it's HP-specific. The OEM OS image that is loaded on this system doesn't seem stable in some ways and I believe that they've installed something based on the Sonic software that's causing this issue.

Wouldn't make a difference since ImgBurn doesn't install anything on your system: it just extracts the ImgBurn executable files in its folder under Program Files ("Program Files (x86)" if you're using a x64 OS).

That last unfortunately had no effect from the perspective of ImgBurn; verification hung again @ 72%. The system was then locked after I attempted to cancel the verification process. As a last test, I tried PowerISO and it was able to successfully erase a DVD-RW, burn the .iso and verify the written image.

I'm still convinced that there is a conflict somewhere between some remnant of the Sonic software and ImgBurn; a conflict that does not appear to affect PowerISO. I am willing to continue troubleshooting to find the root cause and help both myself and others - I've been using ImgBurn for quite some time on XP Pro and find it to be a very useful application.

P.S. This system is running Windows 7 Home 64-bit. My experience (on other computers) with DVD Decrypter has been excellent. I switched to ImgBurn on this system because DVD Decrypter did not work for me on Windows 7 64-bit. This problem (the initial verify fails) has occurred every time, and the re-verify has always succeeded.(though sometimes a program restart was needed). The resulting DVD copies have always been good,

For whatever reason, your system/drive isn't returning real data (from the disc) in response to the "read" command at that moment in time - it seems to be returning blank/empty/zeroed out sectors. I have no idea why that is and I have no way to look into it as it's only happening on your machine.

I tried "Nero 11 Burning ROM" with "verify after copy" enabled. As with Windows 7 "Windows Disc Image Burner", Nero 11 burned and verified the disk without error -- and the resulting disk worked properly.

I then tried ImgBurn again (using a different .iso file) and the failure occurred again: the initial verify returned errors, but the re-verify completed with no compare errors. (Log file is attached.) As before, the burned DVD works fine.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with the ones before or after and when you run the standalone verify function straight after (which you're saying is fine), it's running the exact same code again. There is no 'bug' here, it's just that the sequence of commands is showing an anomaly with your system/drive.

Try going into the Settings, I/O tab, Page 2 and change the I/O Transfer Length to 'Manual' and make sure it's set on 32 KiB. I wonder if you'll then just have 16 sectors that miscompare, it'll remain being the same 32 sectors or if it'll be totally fine.

As a separate test, I downloaded and installed "Active@ISO Burner". As with Windows 7 "Windows Disc Image Burner", and also with "Nero 11 Burning ROM", Active@ISO Burner burned and verified the disk without error -- and the resulting disk worked properly.

Per your suggestion, I changed the ImgBurn I/O Transfer Length setting to 'Manual' and made sure it was set on 32 KiB -- and as with the previous ImgBurn tests, the initial verify failed, the re-verify succeeded, and the resulting disk seems fine. The log file is attached (showing both the initial verify and the subsequent re-verify). (After this test, I changed the Transfer Length back to "Automatic".)

If you want to spend some time looking into the issue you're having, I'd start by trying the drive with other discs... CDs, DVD-RW / DVD+RW etc. and see if the problem persists. Then try it in another PC and try another drive in your PC - see if the problem follows it or goes away.

4. On my Windows 7 (64-bit) system, the write-image-with-verify operation completes successfully (using the Philips DVD+R media) with every other ISO burning program I've tried, which so far are:

Windows Disc Image Burner (comes with Windows 7)

Nero 11 Burning ROM

Active@ISO Burner

CDBurnerXP

Ashampoo Burning Studio FREE

IDEAS

Incidentally, I'm a retired programmer, and have developed several commercial products, including a disk utility that was popular several years ago -- and I've encountered several problems like this one over the years. There were often some combination of drivers, firmware, and hardware that behaved unexpectedly, and often my program was nominally doing the right thing. But as long as other similar programs worked and mine didn't, it was necessary to address those cases to maintain market share. And in this case, at least five other ISO burning programs are working properly on my system, and ImgBurn is not.

Some thoughts that may be of use:

Regardless of where the problem lies (within or outside of ImgBurn), the business solution is to modify ImgBurn so it can handle whatever is unusual in this situation. The fact that there are no other bug reports doesn't mean my system is unique. When one program doesn't work, most users just move to another without taking the time to submit a problem report. Also, as my system is relatively new, there's a chance the problem may occur more often as more people upgrade to newer systems.

I agree that procuring the same DVD burner would likely be a wasted effort. Also, the possible reasons this is happening are endless. E.g., one of the other installed burning programs (such as Nero 11) may have insinuated its own logical driver into the Windows driver hierarchy, and that driver may be buggy or causing trouble for ImgBurn (even so, since the manufacturer won't change it, fixing the problem bounces back to modifying ImgBurn). Another possibility is that some driver is returning more bytes (e.g., of some property) than requested, causing a buffer overflow in ImgBurn.

The good news is that this problem is 100% reproducible, making it much easier to find and fix than an intermittent problem. This means you have a good chance of finding it quickly by remotely connecting to my system and setting breakpoints and/or creating a test version of ImgBurn that produces a more detailed log. (Unfortunately, since the problem occurs only with DVD+R media, I'll have to feed blank DVD+R disks as needed, instead of you being able to work at leisure with a single rewritable disk.)

If for any reason you don't want to debug this problem remotely, there are several API monitoring tools (which I've never used) that can log API calls from specific applications. It may be possible to monitor one of those other ISO burning programs on your computer to see what calls it issues. E.g., there may be more than one way to reset a drive, or driver, etc., and not all of them work the same with all hardware.

I hope the above is of help.

Please just confirm something for me... Your drive with the same DVD+R media works fine in another PC? Have you tried booting your machine to safe mode and burning one of the DVD+R discs that usually fail? I do have a tool that can be used to log all of the I/O on a machine, I can send an end user version of it over to you via email if you're happy to do that. Do any of those other burning tools cycle the drive tray between write and verify operations? If not, try turning that option off on the 'write' tab in ImgBurn's settings.

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