Hi Group: When I got my dual 1.2GHz MDD a few months ago, I found it had two optical drives fitted, although only the upper one was functional. Clicking the 'open drive' icon showed one drive: the button always opened the top one and sometimes the lower one would open too. As I had it out of service today to install my newly acquired SCSI card (and that's another story - showed up in Profiler but no OSX drivers available), I decided to replace the non-functioning drive. I removed the drive cage, and then I noticed that both drives were jumpered as 'Master'. "Ahah!" I thought....that's why drive 1 isn't working, so I jumpered it as slave and restarted the machine. And suddenly I had two DVD drives showing when I clicked on the "open Drive" button.and reacting individually....."Great" I thought, but drive 1 still wouldn't recognise any optical media I put in it. So pretty obviously borked....possibly a non-operative laser...the drive is a Sony combo drive dated October 2003 so quite likely to have expired. Having an old DVD ROM that came out of my dead Sawtooth, I decided to try that. Jumpered as 'Slave' I fitted it and tried a reboot. No joy, and I no longer had two drives showing in the drive open button. But I did have another DVD ROM that I had bought BNIB from a thrift shop some months ago. That went in, showed up in System Profiler as a Lite-on DVD SHD - 16P1S rev. GS07, but again was not showing on the button, and I could only open it by pressing the 'open' button on the front of the drive. But when I put a DVD in I got the 'Assign Region Code" screen, so that was set to R1, because I have quite a few of those, and since the machine has the 128MB GeForce Ti Graphics card (what a monster: straddles the PRAM battery and runs the length of the machine!) driving a 21" Mac CRT monitor, it's excellent for media (and I have a choice of MacPro speakers or LaCie Firewire speakers so it sounds OK too!).
It plays perfectly, and will open by ejecting the disc from the Desktop. I watched my just-bought "In the heat of the night" (twice: second time with commentary - that's why I like R1 discs!): I then ripped it with Mac the Ripper, and that file plays absolutely perfectly with VLC. This new drive doesn't show in Disk utility either, but the other drive (TSST corp CD/DVDW TS-H552U rev. US06) does and (almost) always has worked fine. I don't know if it's relevant, but I got an unopened copy of iLife 08 last week, and the DVD of that would NOT mount on this machine (tried 3 or 4 times, including after a reboot - sounded like it was spinning up then down again: the iWork trial CD; also brand new, opened fine, as did two different movie DVD's) although this iLife DVD worked perfectly on my G4 iMac So any thoughts as to what may be going on here? I tried resetting PRAM on the off chance....I know clutching at a straw!...obviously no difference, and also tried a safe boot in case it was a cache issue: again zilch! Running 10.5.8 with 2GB memory, and two 160 GB hard drives, one original one new.. I did try drive 0 as slave and 1 as master - no change, also both as cable select - no difference. Is it perhaps a firmware issue, either with the G4 or the non-Apple drives perhaps? Hoping someone here has a solution to this little mystery. Dan -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
