Problem with external drive

sUICIDE_mONKEY

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I got an apple dvd-ram drive pulled from an AGP, Sawtooth G4 It came this morning and I put it into an external firewire case. Problem is nothing will mount, went to system profiler it cant see anything on the firewire port.
The instruction book said the drive has to be set to master mode, when i was puttin it in i couldnt tell which one was master as it didnt seem to be labled.... does anyone know which one it would be... i think its set to the right,
any ideas?
 
ive opened it back up, i can see the lettering, wasnt directly over the port, must be why i missed it,it goes left to right c,s,m heres a pic, the pin seems to be in the master setting...
 

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Do the instructions for the FireWire case specify what jumpers to use for an optical drive? You can also try "CS" (Cable Select) and see if that helps.

AFAIK, there is very limited support for DVD-RAM drives under OS X...
 
Cheers,
It only says at the bottom of the case that all ide drives have to be set to master in order to function properly....
I'll try it in the cs setting then try os9
 
nope, cs didnt work in X and rebooted into 9 and both cs and m didnt seem to do anything...... any more ideas? its an apple drive (matsushita), so it should work at least in ..... shoudnt it? or is it just compatable internally??....
 
ah crud... anyone know for sure?
What about a pioneer 106/107/108 are any of them supported in an external firewire case? and do they read dvd-ram discs?
 
:D Woo Hoo :D i have it workin, found this on xl8 http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/action.lasso?-search which linked to a firmware patch... http://www.triumphtech.com/Driver/oxford_updater_Mac.sit .... which allowed me to access the settings of the firmware and change them and it now works...
... well, with cds and dvds...
...... :( it wont read my dvd-ram discs, i dont even get the 'osx doesnt recognise this disk, initialise?' screen, it just spits them out... the discs are burned on a panasonic dmr-e55 (TV recorder) they are type 4, 4.7gb per side discs also panasonic.
Do i have to close the disc to make them work? it tells me i must finalise dvd-r's in order to have them read in other dvd drives but doesnt say for dvd-ram, if i were to close them, that would make them unwritable to again im presumeing..... or could the actual disk be incompatible with the drive, or the format in which its written?...
 
The format of the disk is likely the problem. Technically, you don't "close" a DVD-RAM disk like you do a DVD-R or DVD-RW.

When the drive is plugged into the computer and powered on, what does System Profiler say about it?
 
Apple has this info about compatible DVD-RAM disks:

Single-sided 2.6 gigabyte (GB) DVD-RAM Type 1 cartridge (disc not removable) and Type 2 cartridge (disc removable)
Double-sided 5.2 GB DVD-RAM Type 1 cartridge (disc not removable)
Single-sided 4.7 GB DVD-RAM Type 1 and Type 2 cartridge (Power Mac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet) only)
Double-sided 9.4 GB DVD-RAM Type 1 and Type 2 cartridge (Power Mac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet) only)

You may be able to read the DVD-RAM disks, but you can not write to DVD-RAM disks unless they are in the removable cartridge.
 
Sys Profiler says the following:
FireWire (PC Card)
FireWire Device Information
GUID 30e00100ac1718
Vendor ID 12512
Speed 400 Mb/sec
Unit SW Version 10483
Disc Burning Fully supported.
Vendor Name Oxford Semiconductor Ltd.
Product Name OXFORD IDE Device
Product Identification PD-2 LF-D110
Vendor Identification MATSHITA
Product Revision LevelA110

So these type4 disks are probably not supported? id have to get the type1 or 2 disks yeah? I dont need to write to the disks, though it would be usefull for archiving, just need to read from them.
 
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