stevemachelp
Registered
I can not find an external DVD burner that will work with my mac. Tried two supposedly mac compatible Lacie and Otherworld Computing Mercury drives and both had problems and had to be returned. Here are the hardware details and things I have tried so far...
Hardware>
Macintosh Blue/white 300 mhz with Rev 1 motherboard
CPU processor upgrade zif G4 600 mhz installed and running fine (problem existed prior to this upgrade with original processor as well- I thought the new speedier processor would solve the problem but has not)
40 gig IBM internal hard drive connected to the original Rev 1 motherboard controller (plenty free space on drive which is partitioned into two parts-I copy files FROM either partition)
Over 800 megs ram
OS X 10.3.9 running smoothly other than this problem. Mac firmware was upgraded prior to Panther installation.
Burning software (all tried and failed)>
Toast Titanium v6.1.1
Dragon Burn
Portfolio image database
OS X burning
Errors encountered (on cd or dvd burns)>
Burns fail either during burn or during verification.
Failure so severe burner freezes and you have to force quite Toast and turn off the power to burner.
Burner installed via firewire or USB2.0 internal card-both show same problem. Also 2 firewire drives seem to slow down when burner is turned on (i.e. takes 10-15 seconds to copy 1 meg data to them from internal drive)
Tried various speeds and media on both DVD and CD and problem still exists. I get buffer underrun and sense key errors from Toast. Sometimes I get a complete burn but then it freezes on verification step. Sometimes the disk seems good afterward but usually I end up with coasters. I know the burners I tried are ok because they work fine on a different G4 mac in my office.
I am wondering if the Rev 1 motherboard could be part of the problem. I found out the hard way that the first Blue/White models had this less than perfect controller when I tried to add a second internal slave drive and all drives crashed after a few days. It was then that I researched and saw the story of the early rev1 board controllers.
Another thought that I had was that perhaps the power supply was starting to go bad. The problem is that everything else seems to work fine... except the hard drives act up when the burner is turned on. I'm wondering if the power demand of my wall outlet could be overused. I have a lot of devices running off of the same 2 jack outlet. I tried the burner running on a different wall jack however and the problem did not resolve. I have an older QPC CD burner rated at 4x speed and it usually works fine both on burn and verification steps. It doesn't even have buffer underrun protection but seems to work ok most of the time. I do digital photography and desktop publishing and need a faster way to burn CD's and possible DVD as well for archiving. My current 4x cd burner is not sufficient. I considered that if the Rev1 board HD controller is at fault I could try adding a PCI ATA card and connecting the internal drive that way to bypass the troublesome controller but don't want to spend even more money unless I'm sure it's the likely reason for the problem. Can you help me with this vexing problem. Everything else works fine except this one issue and I'd hate to have to buy a whole new mac just to burn cd's faster than 4x. Thank you for any help you can offer.
Hardware>
Macintosh Blue/white 300 mhz with Rev 1 motherboard
CPU processor upgrade zif G4 600 mhz installed and running fine (problem existed prior to this upgrade with original processor as well- I thought the new speedier processor would solve the problem but has not)
40 gig IBM internal hard drive connected to the original Rev 1 motherboard controller (plenty free space on drive which is partitioned into two parts-I copy files FROM either partition)
Over 800 megs ram
OS X 10.3.9 running smoothly other than this problem. Mac firmware was upgraded prior to Panther installation.
Burning software (all tried and failed)>
Toast Titanium v6.1.1
Dragon Burn
Portfolio image database
OS X burning
Errors encountered (on cd or dvd burns)>
Burns fail either during burn or during verification.
Failure so severe burner freezes and you have to force quite Toast and turn off the power to burner.
Burner installed via firewire or USB2.0 internal card-both show same problem. Also 2 firewire drives seem to slow down when burner is turned on (i.e. takes 10-15 seconds to copy 1 meg data to them from internal drive)
Tried various speeds and media on both DVD and CD and problem still exists. I get buffer underrun and sense key errors from Toast. Sometimes I get a complete burn but then it freezes on verification step. Sometimes the disk seems good afterward but usually I end up with coasters. I know the burners I tried are ok because they work fine on a different G4 mac in my office.
I am wondering if the Rev 1 motherboard could be part of the problem. I found out the hard way that the first Blue/White models had this less than perfect controller when I tried to add a second internal slave drive and all drives crashed after a few days. It was then that I researched and saw the story of the early rev1 board controllers.
Another thought that I had was that perhaps the power supply was starting to go bad. The problem is that everything else seems to work fine... except the hard drives act up when the burner is turned on. I'm wondering if the power demand of my wall outlet could be overused. I have a lot of devices running off of the same 2 jack outlet. I tried the burner running on a different wall jack however and the problem did not resolve. I have an older QPC CD burner rated at 4x speed and it usually works fine both on burn and verification steps. It doesn't even have buffer underrun protection but seems to work ok most of the time. I do digital photography and desktop publishing and need a faster way to burn CD's and possible DVD as well for archiving. My current 4x cd burner is not sufficient. I considered that if the Rev1 board HD controller is at fault I could try adding a PCI ATA card and connecting the internal drive that way to bypass the troublesome controller but don't want to spend even more money unless I'm sure it's the likely reason for the problem. Can you help me with this vexing problem. Everything else works fine except this one issue and I'd hate to have to buy a whole new mac just to burn cd's faster than 4x. Thank you for any help you can offer.
