Mac mini CD-R woes

Mikuro

Mikuro

Crotchety UI Nitpicker
My Mac mini's combo drive is a little screwy. Ever since I bought it, I haven't been able to burn CD-Rs at 24x. Toast will let me select 24x or 16x, and its progress indicator will show the amount of time it should take at that speed, but the actual time it takes is more like 8x (which is to say, Toast's timer counts down about 1 second for every 3). This behavior was the same in both Panther and now Tiger. I haven't tried burning CD-RWs.

It's not that my disk can't feed it the data fast enough, because Toast's "check speed" feature reports that my disk has read speed to spare.

Also, the Finder won't recognize my drive at all. Says it's unsupported, which I find a more than little hard to believe.

I've tried zapping my PRAM and NV-RAM, following some advice I found regarding a similar problem with old iBooks, but that didn't change anything. I also ran the Apple Hardware Test, but it was no help.

Any ideas? I'm doing some major backing up right now, and this slow drive is driving me crazy.
 
Beside the unrecognized combo drive in the finder, I would recommend you to take another brand for your CD-Rs. Verbatim works fine with my superdrive and burns at maximum speed.
Was your combo drive shown in Finder under panther?
 
I would also suggest using Verbatim CD-Rs. Always work for me. Memorex always used to be unbalanced, or slightly cracked and caused the Mac mini and the computer stand to vibrate like crazy.
 
I never tried using the Finder in Panther, so I really don't know. I burn mostly ISO 9660 CDs, so the Finder doesn't cut it for me.

I don't think it's the media, because it's happened with more than one brand: Fujifilm and TDK. Besides, wouldn't bad media just turn out corrupt? Would it really slow the drive down?

FireStarter also won't work. It just gives me vague errors when I try to burn.
 
Actually slowing down seems pretty much media related to me. Get some Verbatim just for testing. If they fail, you should consult apple.
 
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