[julesstoop]

Dear applenovians,

Yesterday I received a call by a dear friend of mine whom also happens to be the buyer of a PowerMac G4 (733 MHz) I sold recently. She is, what we could call, a happy switcher.

As of yesterday, coinciding with the installation of iTunes 7, she is unable to burn CD's. First we thought the problem might be iTunes, so I talked her through downgrading to iTunes 6. This went without a hitch. Still it turned out, she couldn't burn any CD's, so I asked her if she could test this with other software. As it turned out, nothing works (from toast, to disk utility) and inserting a blank CD doesn't lead to the behaviour set in system preferences (e.g. open iTunes), nothing at all happens. No response from the system, no error messages.

Thusfar we have tried the following:

- Repairing permissions,
- ditching some prefernce files related to disk burning,
- trying with a fresh user account,
- trying again after a reboot,

I read through her DiscRecording.log she sent me by e-mail. There are no entries after sept. 11, though she thinks she might have burned a disc a few days ago (does a session get logged if everything went without a hith and verification was not skipped?)

Some more info about the system:
- OS X 10.4.7
- Burner: PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-107D 1.15
- no other random glitches that we are aware of (everything works except for burning discs)
- There should be enough RAM and HD-space on the system.

I'm a bit at a loss here. Anyone have any idea what could be wrong besides the obvious (hardware failure)?

Thanks in advance!

[alcimedes]

the weird part is that the problem exists between user accounts. that implies that the problem isn't software related, and pushes towards hardware.

If you go to the computer's "more info" (under "about this mac") what does it describe the CD drive as?

I suppose you could try the reset-nvram, reset-all commands, then run an fsck-fy in single user mode for kicks while you're at it. (details can be found in the FAQ thread up top). other than that it's screaming hardware failure to me.

[julesstoop]

Thanks.
I'll try those last things once I get around her machine (somewhere this week). I'll take my internal drive with me as well, so we can test if the machine works with a drive that's known to be fine.

If al else fails, new drives aren't that expensive any more.
By the way, will any DVD-reburner work as a 'superdrive' or do we need one with special Apple approved firmware?