Have just encountered the same problem myself. Manifested itself as growisofs ceasing to function following an upgrade from gutsy to hardy (I hadn't tried to write a DVD for some time after the upgrade). Same problem occurred with the intrepid and jaunty versions of growisofs. Using TDK DVD-R media on a Philips PBDV1640P revision B3.4.

After much messing around I discovered that omitting the -dvd-compat switch from the growisofs command line makes it work... so the command I ended up running was:

$ growisofs -Z /dev/scd0=foo.iso

Proof that it worked:

$ md5sum foo.iso /dev/scd0
a7e18f22eb98f8d62caf1ffcb30c70dc  foo.iso
a7e18f22eb98f8d62caf1ffcb30c70dc  /dev/scd0



dvdrecord didn't work either and I couldn't make it work; sample of output:

$ dvdrecord -v driveropts=burnfree speed=1 dev=1,0,0 -dao foo.iso
dvdrtools v0.3.1
Portions (C) 2002-2006 Ark Linux <email address hidden>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
this program; see the file COPYING.  If not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
Based on:
Cdrecord 1.11a15 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2001 J�g Schilling
TOC Type: 1 = CD-ROM
scsidev: '1,0,0'
scsibus: 1 target: 0 lun: 0
Linux sg driver version: 3.5.34
Using libscg version 'bero-0.5a'
dvdrecord: Warning: using inofficial version of libscg (bero-0.5a '@(#)scsitransp.c     1.81 01/04/20 Copyright 1988,1995,2000 J. Schilling').
Driveropts: 'burnfree'
atapi: 1
Device type    : Removable CD-ROM
Version        : 5
Response Format: 2
Capabilities   : 
Vendor_info    : 'PHILIPS '
Identifikation : 'PBDV1640P       '
Revision       : 'B3.4'
Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD.
Using generic SCSI-3/mmc DVD-R(W) driver (mmc_mdvd).
Driver flags   : SWABAUDIO BURNFREE 
Supported modes: PACKET SAO
Drive buf size : 688128 = 672 KB
FIFO size      : 4194304 = 4096 KB
Track 01: data  4404 MB        
Total size:     5058 MB (501:08.05) = 2255104 sectors
Lout start:     5058 MB (501:10/04) = 2255104 sectors
Current Secsize: 2048
  ATIP start of lead in:  -150 (00:00/00)
Disk type:    unknown dye (reserved id code)
Manuf. index: -1
Manufacturer: unknown (not in table)
Blocks total: 2298496 Blocks current: 2298496 Blocks remaining: 43392
Starting to write CD/DVD at speed 1 in write mode for single session.
Last chance to quit, starting real write in 0 seconds. Operation starts.
Waiting for reader process to fill input buffer ... input buffer ready.
trackno=0
BURN-Free is ON.
dvdrecord: Turning BURN-Free on
Performing OPC...
Sending CUE sheet...
Starting new track at sector: 2255270
Track 01:   0 of 4404 MB written.dvdrecord: Input/output error. write_g1: scsi sendcmd: no error
CDB:  2A 00 00 22 69 A6 00 00 1F 00
status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION)
Sense Bytes: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 12 00 00 00 00 21 02 00 00
Sense Key: 0x5 Illegal Request, Segment 0
Sense Code: 0x21 Qual 0x02 (logical block address out of range) [No matching qualifier] Fru 0x0
Sense flags: Blk 0 (not valid) 
cmd finished after 0.006s timeout 200s

write track data: error after 0 bytes
Sense Bytes: 70 00 00 00 00 00 00 12 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Writing  time:   12.800s
Fixating...
Fixating time:    0.007s
dvdrecord: fifo had 64 puts and 1 gets.
dvdrecord: fifo was 0 times empty and 0 times full, min fill was 100%.



Googling around the place reveals quite a lot of reports of this with the following characteristics in common:

- It always strikes following an upgrade
- CD recording still works, it's only DVDs that don't
- Both growisofs and dvdrecord have problems, but different ones, and if a problem strikes one program it doesn't necessarily mean it'll strike the other
- It affects users of all the main distributions
- Upgrading the dvd tools never fixes it
- Nor does anything else, and nobody seems to have a clue what's going on
- Some people are misled into thinking it's a hardware fault as it disappears when they replace the drive with a totally different model. Nobody seems to have tried replacing the drive with a brand new example of the model they already have. I rather suspect that if they did they'd find it still didn't work.

My suspicion is that the problem is actually in the kernel, not the tools, and affects particular models/revisions of DVD drive.

Kernel here is 2.6.27-7-generic from ubuntu.