Burn ISO's at the slowest possible speed

[wolfman]

Hi all,

as the title suggests, some and/or many problems with your installation can be avoided by burning the ISO file at the "SLOWEST POSSIBLE SPEED", most if not all burner apps will automatically choose the fastest speed available for your disk burner drive so it is important before you commit to burn a CD/DVD that you select the menu tab which controls the burn speed and select the lowest number on offer.
Your burner drive may well support a burn speed of 20 X for DVD and 60 X for CD's and the burnable DVD disk might say "4 X", but you should not burn at 4 X but at something like 2.4 which should be on offer to you. If you want good music CD's, I also advise you to reduce the burn speed to the lowest number on offer.

Using Brasero burning app, you should see something like this window after clicking on "Properties" and as you can see, there are several options of which you should select the lowest number, in the this case 4 X:

The disk in my example pic above had a maximum of 16X burn speed!!, others may only have 4X or 8X!!!. (Talking about burnable DVD's here btw!)

The reason you should select the slowest speed possible is that if you try and burn a disk too fast, you may well get read/write errors on the disks which will lead to a faulty install and/or an unstable system.

When you buy disks, before you start to burn something, hold the disk up to the light and see if you can see any "Pinpricks" of light coming/showing through the disk, if there are little holes, throw the disks away or use them as "Coffee Coasters"!!.

If you follow this advice, you may well save yourself hours of heartache; head scratching and countless posts in forums like this one.

This does not appy to an ISO file being installed on a USB stick!!.

KEEP YOUR DVD BURNER DRIVER CLEAN AS THIS CAN LEAD TO PROBLEMS WHEN READING FROM OR WRITING TO DISKS, ESPECIALLY ONES THAT HAVE JUST BEEN BURNED!:

How to Clean CD/DVD Laser Lens in Computer

See also:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto

This applies to all burner software and is not restricted just to Linux!.

Attention!: Make sure you completely format the USB stick to FAT32 before commencing with Unetbootin or other USB installer software!.

For using Unetbootin when doing a USB install:

How to use Unetbootin

If unetbootin doesn't work for you, try "mintstick". You should (can) also install udisks2 in Ubuntu 15.10 and higher!: http://pkgs.org/search/mintstick http://pkgs.org/download/udisks2 Firstly, download your preferred version of Ubuntu Mate OS, 32 or 64 Bit (if you are unsure, download the 32 Bit version) (Ubuntu/Debian/Voyager/PinguyOS etc) in the form of an ISO file, remember where you store the file!. (I am not talking about using the Unetbootin download function, I am talking about you d…

Regards Wolfman

[palourie]

Also, don’t use “no-name” DVDs - they are a false economy. I made the mistake of buying such DVDs from the local Poundland and ended up with a small pile of useless pieces of plastic before I threw the remainder out …

[CGB]

@palourie

Also, don't use "no-name" DVDs

That's what makes all the difference for me. A drum of cheap knock offs is like playing Russian roulette with your data. By contrast in 10 years of burning discs I've never had a single coaster with verbatim.

[cinema2k]

I might have been lucky.
I use maxell at default settings to burn 16.04.
There appear to be no errors.