Backing up your DVD movies

[Iman74]

Let me know if this post is illegal.

After getting my firewire external Sony DVD r-/r+/rw-/rw+ drive I have been doing some trial and error as far as backing up my DVD movies. I decided on r- dvd's for the simple reason they are the most affordable and I find rw's don't work so well in the DVD area as well as for CDRW's in cd players.

Now as it stands now with the r- sizes available I am always forced to use two DVD's for one of my movies, which leads to my problem. But before we get into all of that let me give you a detail description of what I do. As you can see below in my signature, that is the specks of my PC. When I begin to burn a backup of my DVD I do the following:
I do a cold boot, logon, then proceed to turn off screensavers, power save mode, disable Anti-virus apps, hotsync, pop blocker, and mailwasher.
Then I proceed with the burn. So far I burn one of two always burns without fail, then I put the source back in after the completetion of dvd one and begins to create an image for dvd two. At some point in the process it fails to read the DVD. It varies in percentage, sometimes it 16%, sometimes it's 51%. It's never consistent. Also, this is with three movies. So what I do now is power down the PC, then cold boot it, and proceed with the disabling of all the apps mentioned earlier, then I tell "DVDXCOPY" to skip disk one and go directly to disk two. It does, but somewhere in the burn it fails again. I try about two more times which each failing. So I call it a night and sleep on it. Next morning, I again power my PC from a cold boot do all the previous steps and begin the burn of 2 of 2 and when I am out of the shower it's ready for the blank DVD. Moments later the DVD burn is successful.

These steps and results has been consistent for 3 seperate movies.

Here is what gets me confused, the error is same but the place where it fails is never consistent. Usually when I power it down overnight and try again is when it works. To me that doesn't make sense. PC's are machines, so technically there shouldn't be a difference whether I try again five minutes later or eight hours later.

Any ideas on why this is?

[teamgta]

Could have something to do with the drive overheating. I read some article on burning dvd's and it said something about how drives can overheat. But I really dont know. Just my .2

[Iman74]

Team
I thought about that and to be honest, I wouldn't rule that out. Especially the fact that it seems to work when I give it a few hours break. Maybe I should have a fan blowing on it when burning

[bailey]

I may totally wrong here but do you think maybe the copy protection on the orignal movie may be causeing the problem ?

if it is a movie that you created from your own recorder it should work just fine

[Iman74]

Bailey I thought about that but then I thought that probably isn't it. Reasons:
1. Where it fails is never consistent.
2. It works after I give it several hours to cool off.

If it would be copy protection I would think that it would be a consistant fail and cooling off the device wouldn't have any effect.

[glc]

You could try one of those blue plastic bags of stuff you put in the freezer to use instead of ice for coolers - set one of those on top of the drive when you are burning.