I was copying some programmes to DVD last night but when I went to give the disc a name and finalise it, it failed.

Could just be a bad disc but I think I had just about filled up the disc and I am wondering whether I could have completely filled it and there was no room for the disc name and finalisation. Is this possible?

If the disc was full it would have said and not attempted to burn without a warning, could be a bad dvd, difficult to know without knowing the software you are using and burner etc, are you burning from a pc or dvd recorder, if its a pc try again at a sloswe burn speed

I am using my PVR.

Obviously it did not say it was full before I started to record because it will not let me do so when going to full but I wonder whether it can happen if 99.99% full.

But it could just be a bad disc, #### happens.

My LG DVD Recorder used to happily be able to write 2 hours and 8 minutes of material in SD mode to a blank 4.7Gb DVD disc (100%) and still be able to successfully retitle and finalize the disc.

For the past couple of years or so I've only been able to write maybe 2 hours and 2 minutes of material to blank discs (maybe 95%) - if I overrun this then the machine will almost always fail to finalize the disc. I suspect that it is the laser used to burn the disc which is struggling to write to the very inner circle, or the very outer edge (not sure which), of blank discs. So, I taylor my archiving of material to DVD accordingly. If I need more than 2 hours of material on a single disc, I have to burn it at a lower quality. Otherwise I split my archiving over multiple discs.

Thanks, that seems to confirm it. I just started on a new pack of discs so will have to avoid getting too close to filling a disc - I can usually easily lose a minute off the end of an hour programme with Partial Delete.

So much easier with BR discs !

Disks are read/written from inside out. So if the reading/writing process is failing towards the 100% end of the job then that could be a dirty laser carriage mechanism.

I've had CD players (similar mechanics) which have failed to read the very last minutes of a disk and found the metal bars the carriage slides along had such an accumulation of gunge at the outer end the carriage was stalling before it got to the end of the disk. A quick clean of the bars restored normal operation.

Of course that would involve taking the lid off and also assumes you can get up close and personal with the mechanism to give it a clean up.

Thanks, I will remember if it starts to happen regularly.