Tip: Burn Lion at 4x

It could be a problem with your optical drive or the optical discs that you are using because I have successfully burned and verified it at 8x and 16x. Did you only try using a single brand of media?

My DVD burner failed too, so I just put Lion on a USB drive.
Macs have bad superdrives, there's no doubt about it. The first ever disk I burned on my brand new MacBook Pro failed, and so did the first ever disk I burned on a brand new iMac.

When I tried burning Lion, I used 16x and it said "completed successfully", but when I put the disc back in the drive, the computer thought it was blank. There was obviously content on the disc (by looking at it).

I burned it at 8x the second time and it worked.

it's good practice to always burn discs pertaining to system installs at a lower speed, and its not because your optical drive is faulty, errors happen more often at higher speeds

Errors happen MUCH too often with Apple optical drives in my experience. It's because they're using this weird cheap brand "Mat****a". I wonder why it has the word highlighted in bold in it, I bet it's there for a reason.

I've never had problems burning disks on any PC, mostly with Samsung drives. How many times did I get "Verification Failed" on Macs? How many times did the verification complete successfully, only the disk never worked, or got stuck in my Mac without being able to eject it, as the computer thought there was nothing inside?

Apple uses compromised components to achieve such a slim design. But the thing is, I don't really need to burn disks today anyway, so it's not a big deal. It's just stupid to waste a 4GB USB pendrive on an OS installer, when I may never even use it, and I could be making good use of my pendrive instead.

Needless to say, I tried burning Lion to a DVD as well and it failed even before it started to burn, with a "Failed to calibrate laser power level" message. Can't even clean the laser as it's slot loading.

Funny that you mention that. I burned Ubuntu onto a disk yesterday to put on another computer, and after it was complete, it would not work (the GUI came up, but it wouldn't load past that). Took me a second try to actually get a bootable disk.

I got fed up of the piles of drink coasters I was making so now I only use an external burner for DVDs. CDs will burn OK 95% of the time using the superdrive, but I've never had a mac that will burn DVDs reliably.

Both my DVD and USB worked fine in the end, but I gotta say, USB is hell a lot faster than DVD. Even getting to the setup screen takes about 5 min on dvd!

i always burn at the slowest possible speed (2x i think), minimal chance of error, takes the longest but it makes sense, the longer it takes, the better the burn quality.

baryon said:

It's because they're using this weird cheap brand "Mat****a". I wonder why it has the word highlighted in bold in it, I bet it's there for a reason.

Click to expand...

FYI: Matshita is Panasonic, not exactly a weird cheap brand.

I always always burn disks of critical importance/system files at the slowest possible speed and verify them after they're done. Good practice IMO. Yeah it'll be done faster if you use a higher speed, but you're going to waste 10x as much time later if it burned with errors.