EMedia Professional - The CD-R Writer, January 1997

Chaos Theory and the CD-R Novice

Robert A. Starrett

EMedia Professional, January 1997 1997
Copyright © Online Inc.

A recent plunge into CD-R chaos left us back where we started: no matter what the computer, no matter what the peripheral, no matter what the software, my brother will have trouble with it.
Iknew that CD-R had come into its own when my brother bought and successfully installed a CD-R drive without having to call me for advice or troubleshooting. It's not that he is incompetent with computers or peripherals generally--he's not. He just has had the most horrible luck with hardware and software of anybody I've ever known. Every week he finally gets his system to where he wants it and then it is only a matter of hours before things go wacky for no apparent reason. And I don't think it's his hardware, either. He is on his third system in four months from a major mail order house--his frustration causes him to call them and complain loudly enough that they eventually just send him another new system to shut him up--each one with more power and features than the previous one at no additional cost.

I figured that when the time was right he would get a CD recorder and it would be only a matter of hours before it, like everything else that he tries to install, drove him over the edge and left him to call me with frustration in his voice and a hint of longing for simpler times and simpler things--like computing the Lyapunov exponents of an unstable periodic orbit embedded in a strange attractor. As he works toward his doctorate in mathematics--chaos theory to be precise--I imagine there could be no better grounding for a first time CD-R user than chaos theory--except, perhaps, for chaos practice.

The short-term goal, in my brother's case, is to present and deliver his doctoral dissertation on CD-R, which is not a novel idea, I suppose, but certainly one that might gain you some points with the examination committee and something that will become more popular in the sciences as time goes by; a multimedia dissertation may dazzle examining professors much as a multimedia game dazzles children.

Two days passed without a call for help. I knew he had only five pieces of media and, as a graduate student, he couldn't afford more, at least not until he graduated. So I assumed that he was successfully making discs. I expected no dissertation discs yet, necessarily, but audio discs, since in his former life he was a musician. And I figured if he'd made even one coaster, he would have called me.

On the third day, I started to worry that maybe he had made a coaster right out of the gate, thrown it on the floor in frustration, and then slipped on it as he went to the phone to call me to vent his frustration.

Finally, I got really worried and called him. "Say, John," I asked, "I was just wondering--how is your CD recorder working?"

"Works great," he replied. "This is cool--I copied a bunch of my old studio tapes to CD."

"No problems?"

"No--everything works great. I just plugged it in, installed the software, and started making CDs."

What a relief for me. After all he had been through with funky hard drives and bad memory and motherboards and every other conceivable PC problem and glitch--hardware, software, or otherwise--here was a shining example of a technology that worked for him, the cursed one, right out of the box.

CHAOS THEORY CATCHES UP

It wasn't until the day before my brother's dissertation was due that the phone rang. "What's an absorption control error?" my brother asked.

"An absorption control error just means that your disc might be dirty," I replied. "Clean it or try another disc."

But my brother said he'd already tried that, and when he attempted to write to the new disc, the following error message appeared: "Write address is EFM area."

So I suggested he reboot the computer and start over, and when his next post-reboot writing attempt failed, the screen read, "SCSI device not responding. Additional sense code AE0h." My brother asked me what that meant, and I answered, "The computer can't find your recorder."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Well, it could happen for a lot of reasons--an actual physical failure of the recorder, a loose cable, a loose card, a bad cable, even a bad card." "What should I do?" he asked.

"Try scanning the SCSI bus with the Adaptec utilities to see if the drive shows up there." He said he didn't know where those utilities were, and I advised him to reboot again. When he did, the system recognized the recorder, which seemed to leave him all clear to write to disc again. But the process derailed yet again, this time flashing the message, "ASPI driver not installed."

"Quit the program and restart it," I told him.

"OK," he said, "now it seems to work. But why did it show those errors?"

"Well, it just happens sometimes," I replied.

"But there is a reason, surely."

"Of course there is," I said, "but the fact that it works now should be good enough, don't you think?

"No, not really," answered the mathematician. "I'd like to know what happened so I can fix it so it won't happen again."

"Chances are that it will happen again, sometime," I said, "but the chances are also that you will never figure out what caused it. Just be happy that it works now."

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS FROM CHAOS: IS THERE AN ANSWER?

I never really thought my brother would successfully join the CD-R-capable anyway, even though he's not entirely inept with new technology, and furthermore, I know there are thousands of users happily writing CDs all over the world who never run into these problems. But if it worked out for my computer-hexed brother, then anybody could do it. So our recent plunge into CD-R chaos left us back where we started: no matter what the computer, no matter what the peripheral, no matter what the software, my brother will have trouble with it.

Several days later I called him again. "Did you get your dissertation submitted?" I asked.

"No," he replied, "never did get that thing to work again." He sounded unusually calm for someone who had just blown it big-time.

"Why didn't you call me?" I asked him.

"Because you don't have all the answers," he said. "Besides, you always say not to worry about it if it works now. I want to find out what's wrong, so I can fix it and I won't get these errors again." I asked him what errors he was getting now, and he read me the list he'd written down: "First," he recited, "a track following error, then a repositioning error, then another ASPI error, then an invalid block address, then unable to read PMA, then an optimum power calibration error. . ." I stopped him there.

"It sounds like a bad drive to me," I said.

"That's what I thought, too. So I had them replace the drive and I still got errors." And he launched into yet another errata roll call: "Can't recover from track, can't recover from lead-in, can't recover from optimum power calibration area. . ."

"Those are media errors," I interrupted. "Did you try. . ."

He was resigned now. "Yes, I tried a bunch of different discs. But after running the test 10 times, I told it to record and at 99 percent finished, I got a buffer underrun error."

"You're almost there," I said, excitedly. "If you just tweak your system just a little. . ."

He interrupted, sounding both world-weary and encouraged at the same time. "That's OK. I decided not to turn in the dissertation after all. I've got a new subject I'd rather pursue."

"I thought you couldn't wait to finish. Won't that keep you as a graduate student for awhile?"

"Not more than five or six more years, I suppose."

"So what's the new subject?" I asked.

"The new title is: 'The Application of Chaos Theory to Explain Certain Anomalies and Aberrations in the Interaction of Intel Microprocessors, the Windows Microcomputer Operating System, Advanced SCSI Programming Interface Layers, SCSI Control Circuits, and Various Control Software for Compact Disc Optical Recording Mechanisms.'"

I think his estimate of five or six years is overly optimistic.

Robert A. Starrett is a contributing editor for EMedia Professional, The CD-R Writer columnist, and an independent consultant based in Denver, Colorado. He is the co-author of of CD-ROM Professional's CD-Recordable Handbook.

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