Freeze with CD/DVD in drive

[toasterking]

The DVD drive works fine as long as I keep accessing the disc. If a CD or DVD is left in my DVD-ROM drive for a timeout period (around 10 minutes in my testing; the actual timeout may be less), and then an attempt to access the disc is made, Mac OS X hangs. By "hangs" I mean that I get a spinning beach ball, and the Finder stops responding and cannot be successfully relaunched. Other apps continue to respond but only until the next disk access -- then they hang too. The only solution is a hard reboot.

I'm running Mac OS X 10.4.7 on a Power Macintosh G4/350 (AGP Graphics - Sawtooth motherboard) with 768 MB RAM. 22 GB available on the Mac OS X partition, and about 270 GB free overall. The internal hard drive is firewire, 400 GB. There's an ATI Xclaim VR 128 graphics card in a PCI slot; other than that, no add-ons.

I tried reinstalling Mac OS X -- no change. I tried swapping the firewire hard drive for a regular IDE one connected to the motherboard -- no change. I originally had a non-stock Toshiba DVD-RW (Apple System Profiler reported no burning support, but "vendor supported"). Thinking that may be the cause of the problem, I swapped it for a Pioneer DVR-110D which Apple ships in its own newer towers (ASL now reports burn support with "Apple Shipped/Supported") -- no change. I installed PatchBurn. I uninstalled PatchBurn. No change.

A search for this on Google reveals next to nothing. Any ideas?

 

[eric2006]

You've isolated the problem pretty well. Reinstalling OS X had no change, so this isn't a software problem. Changing out the drives had no change, so it's not the optical disk drive that's faulty. You tried a different hard drive, no change. This isolates the problem to the motherboard. Try swapping out RAM to see if one is bad. Try putting in the original GFX card if you have it. If all else fails, a new machine of the same model will run for about $100.