Rantings of a Lunatic

So, I have some plans for some different pieces of computer equipment, and this has caused me to realize that I need to backup my external HD to DVD and reformat it to better use it. It is currently storing about 400Gb of data from OS X, and is formatted HFS+. I went over a couple of different options, and then on a whim figured I would just plug it into my linux box, and see if it would read it. The good news is that it popped right up and is fully readable, I didn’t check if its writable, but I don’t care, as long as I can read it to burn the DVDs from I will be fine. I am a little worried about the files still being readable on a mac after burning them, because I doubt the meta-data will transfer correctly, but thats really only a concern for Apps, which are all inside DMGs as far as I have checked. So, I am not too worried, and I will test the first DVD before I do anything crazy like burn 100 discs or format the partitions. Anyway, I plugged in the drive and it works, so I launched K3b, my disc burning application of choice on linux, only to find out that I don’t have access to a DVD writer in this machine. This of course struck me as odd, because I have litterally burned 100+ DVDs on this exact hardware setup, and I burned a CD on it 2 weeks ago. The difference is that I have gotten a new kernel recently, probably after I last burned anything. So I spent a few hours back and forth trying to diagnose the problem. I got so fed up at one point I left the room, and just to do anything else, I went and shaved. The DVD drive was working ok at the BIOS level, so I knew it wasn’t a hardware problem, but just after I logged in, the drive would stop responding completely. It got to the point that I wasn’t even able to eject the tray from the drive. After trying rolling back the kernel, forcing multiple modules to load and to not load, I finally just kept ejecting the drive all the way past the login process, and it was continuing to work. I decided that I would try a different app, which happened to be installed called Brasero, which I have never used before, and really don’t trust too much, but it couldn’t hurt anything I figured. And that was the key. I had been launching K3b right away everytime, trying to see if it could detect the drive, and it was taking forever to launch, and the drive would never come up. This time, Brasero launched right away, and had the hardware identification information right at the bottom of the window. So, apparently its not a kernel issue that is killing my DVD burner, its that K3b is not compatible with the SATA or libata modules that the updated kernel has built in. And at the end of the process, Brasero is testing the first DVD through its checksum, but it appears to be working out ok.
I guess its time to move on and leave K3b behind, or at least until they come out with a solid KDE4 version, which I am not sure if I have or not. I do know that my system is completely up to date though. Through this all, I have done a couple of apt-get update and apt-get upgrades to make sure that everything is current.