dire troubles with k3b and LG DVDRAM GH22NS40

hello all, since i upgraded to ubuntu karmic my dvd drive has stubborn 
problems with DVD-RW's while simple DVD-R get written alright. I've been 
using K3B since years and never got in so many troubles.

my system is kubuntu 9.10 karmic on AMD64x2 athlon 6000+ with 4 gb of 
ram. the DVD unit /dev/sr0 is a LG DVDRAM GH22NS40 SATA with firmware 
NL00 (needs the available upgrade NL01 but so far i can't get access to 
a SATA windows machine to run the upgrade tool) K3B is Version 1.68.0 . 
Wodim is 1.1.9  .


K3B complains about media errors, the drive not liking the media (with 
6x verbatim new DVDs  ) power calibration failures or I/O errors. so far 
i tried only DVD-RW's,  DVD-R's written in SAO mode (no errors) .   
While K3B (and NERO) refuse to write RWs GnomeBaker does even if i can't 
write a second session. also when i attempt to rewrite DVDs burned with 
GnomeBaker , K3B asks me if  i want to overwrite them and then fails.

the output of hdparm -v /dev/sr0  :

/dev/sr0:
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Bad address   ------------don't really 
know what this means but it looks nasty
IO_support    =  0 (default)
readonly      =  0 (off)
readahead     =  8 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device


dmesg info about DVD's:

[    0.960116] ata2.00: ATAPI: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH22NS40, NL00, max UDMA/100
[    1.005172] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH22NS40  
NL00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

i already checked the power/sata connectors being correctly plugged in.
I'm really in need to solve this issue. an hints ? do you think this may 
be cause by a drive fault or it's rather a software issue?

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