LXDE Is a Work in Progress! - CD/DVD issues

[BHReach]

pcmanfm does not handle removable media very well. It is best not to use it for mounting, unmounting or ejecting media. There is a Disk Utility included that works reliably (at least so far) with LXDE and is the best tool to use for managing mountable media.

pcmanfm will crash during removable media operations and create states that prevent you from reading from the media requiring a reboot to fix the problem (so far I have not found another solution).

I will relate a problem that just occurred.

I used K3b to burn a DVD. It did not finish normally, i.e., it did not give the flushing cache and closing volume messages I am used to seeing and it did not eject the DVD but it did say the write was successful. I tested the DVD and it worked fine. I don't have all of kde installed and I figured some part was missing that made it finish abnormally but did not affect the burn.

I burned a second disk with K3b and it ended abnormally again. I tried to access the disk (with pcmanfm) and I got read errors. I tried with other file managers (mucommander and Gnome-commander) and got read errors. I'm thinking "oh #$@^& I burned a coaster". I decided it was most likely K3b's fault because of the abnormal way it finished the burn.

I installed xcdroast a very reliable burner I used to use before K3b and burned a duplicate DVD, xcdroast worked perfectly and ejected the DVD. I tried to read it and got the same read errors. I was using pcmanfm and my other FMs but they all gave the same read error (BTW pcmanfm would crash intermittently while trying to read the disk, the other FMs did not).

This is when I discovered the Disk Utility (I recall looking at it previously but forgot it was there) but I could not fix the DVD read problem. I rebooted and everything worked normally again with the last 2 burned DVDs working fine.

I think the wise thing to do is stop using pcmanfm altogether until it matures and use the Disk Utility to manage mounting and unmounting of media and my other 2 FMs for accessing files. That should make my system more stable.