Unable to Burn "Recovery Discs" on New Laptop
Anyone who has purchased a new desktop or laptop recently (from most OEMs) have noticed that recovery discs (CDs or DVDs that allow for reinstallation of essential software) have become a thing of the past. To cut costs, these computer manufacturers are hoping customers are willing and able to pull out some blank discs and do the burning themselves. Recently for me, with a new laptop, creating these discs successfully simply was not happening.
The specific model of laptop that I purchased was an Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv4-1280us. I futilely tried to burn with media from different vendors, along with different capacities (DVD+R DL, DVD+R). Each time, the disc appeared to burn correctly, but would fail the verification phase. Since it could not verify the first disc properly, I was never allowed to move on to the second disk. Because of risk of violation of copyright, vendors only allow a direct burn from the application once. This limit is kind of idiotic, as there's no way to prevent someone from making copies of discs created by the creation software. I'll note that I used the same application a few weeks earlier on a new desktop from the same manufacturer without issue.
A lot of OEMs use a "Recovery Manager" application licensed from SoftThinks. I'm sure this software works fine (as mentioned, it worked for me on another computer). The specific model of laptop that I purchased was an Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv4-1280us. After poking around at some logs I found, I discovered that the error reported during verification was a typical CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) failure. There are a number of things that may cause this during a disc verify. One notable item is trying to burn a disc too fast (say burning at 16x where the media was only validated for an 8x burn). From looking at the configuration files, it looks like settings for the actual burn were "maximum". I was never able to tweak this down, and it's possible this setting was the origin of my problems. To be honest, I'll never know for sure.
At this point, you may be thinking that since it was a new laptop, it's likely the DVD-RW drive that's bad. I was able to discount that thought by being able to properly burn working operational media in various different formats and applications.
Of course, vendors (HP included) are always willing to sell you the recovery media as an accessory item. However, I have no interest in paying for something that I'm not able to do on my own for misconfigured software. I called HP customer service, and of course was forced to deal with a first-level drone somewhere in India, who was truly no help (they only had an interest in keeping to call as short as possible). I then got annoyed and used the "Live Chat" type of support. While this was a slow painful process, I was able to get the recovery media sent overnight to me via FedEx.
I've since learned that it's good practice to ask for a "Case Manager" if you're going nowhere with the first-level of support. They're still outsourced and incompetent, but they are empowered to actually do stuff so HP doesn't lose customers.
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