Hi Brothers,

today i went through a lot of old CD-R and DVD-R backups. For fun and to finde any obscure MP3s i didn't add to my Library in the past. What i experienced that (many of you may know this already) this optical media is a flawed thing.

Some discs didn't mount in my shiny new MBP. But my dusty old iBook mounted them very quickly. Those slot-in drives in the MBP may look good, but i don't trust that mechanic very much. It sounds scary when inserting a disc. Thalo, what are your experiences with your MBP?

Speaking of faulty slot-loading drives, I was driven to near madness the other day by one. I was helping someone with their computer. They had OS X installed on it but hadn't booted into it. They wanted to try it because the internet sucks in OS 9. Okay, so I change the startup disk and proceed to boot into OS X. It hangs in the middle of the boot-up process. Kernal panic. No problem. Either it's a bad installation, they have some incompatible memory, or they need a firmware update. I can figure that out later. I'll just boot back into OS 9. No go. Holding the OptionKey down on startup to get into the Open Firmware system chooser didn't show OS 9 as an option. Booting up from an OS 9 CD didn't work either. I tried all my voodoo. I booted into Open Firmware directly and tried resetting NVRAM. Tried resetting the Parameter Ram. Nothing. No go.

I thought it was so bolloxed up that that is why the computer wouldn't start up from a CD. It turns out the CD slot-loading drive on this Blueberry iMac was bad. The machine was now a complete piece of useless blueberry junk. I tried everything. What I finally ended up doing was putting on my techie hat and opening up the iMac and removing the drive. I stuck it inside a generic USB case and plugged it into one of my Macs as an external USB drive. The problem was pretty much what I expected. The buggy and piece-of-shit method Apple uses to switch between operating systems had somehow left the OS 9 installation "unblessed." So I "blessed" the OS 9 System Folder by moving the Finder system file out of it and then putting it back in. That usually does the trick and it did in this case. I stuck the drive back into the computer and all was well. But what a tremendous pain in the ass. But if I ever need to upgrade the drive in these things, no problem. I've learned how to do that now.

Many of the discs I burn on my G4 MDD sometimes don't work right on PC's. I don't know why that is.

I totally missed this topic, where has it been hiding? Brother Smithz, I didn't have an MBP, it was a Powerbook G4, 17"... but the drive seemed to work fine.

By FAR the worst drive I have is on the Radiator (Dual 2.5 GHz G5)... I have constant problems with that one. Especially reading double-sided DVDs that I burn. Sometimes they mount fine, sometimes the thing cycles and cranks and grinds and fails. Piece of shit superdrive. I haven't had the money to replace it.

Thalo, you mean "Dual-Layer" DVD-Rs? ... I also have constant problems with them. I can bet that a few Discs of a 10-Pack are faulty or my burner doesn't like them. Anyway, i ordered a massive amount of HD-Space recently.