Hello there... When the internal drive in my G4 PowerBook started to scratch discs right at the end of the computer's three year Apple Care policy in 2009, I had the drive replaced. The replacement works, but I have had a couple of scratched discs nevertheless. However, in order to make absolutely sure that I could use discs without damage and to keep the G4's internal drive working as long as possible I popped into Cancom and bought a LaCie Firewire DVD Writer.
This worked faultlessly for over a year. However, a few weeks ago it appears to have started to misbehave. Being aware of the fact that it has a two year warranty I have been in contact with LaCie's customer support and this long process continues. The fault is difficult to pin down but it seems to come down to Audio CDs. Firstly, it became "picky" while importing audio CDs to iTunes to put on my iPod. It would occasionally decided it was not going to do it at all. When I transferred the CD to the G4's internal drive - no problem. Up to then it had coped with everything that I had "thrown" at it. Then, when I tried to write a couple of audio CDs (that's about all I do in terms of CD / DVD writing, basically for distributing audio) it would fail to write them (using Toast - see later), and I had to disconnect the drive and turn off the power in order to get the untouched (i.e. unwritten) CD out of the drive. Once again, the G4's internal drive managed the task no problem. It continues to read and write all the Data discs that I have used, it's just audio CDs. Oh, and I can not burn CDs from a Burn Folder in the Finder, although I have never tried this before so do not know if I could before. I would have imagined that it could be an updated iTunes, which is regularly updated, but I tend to use Toast 6.11 for burning myself, and that has not changed. As I said, I was ready to blame the LaCie, but yesterday the Customer Support person suggested burning an Audio CD from iTunes (which I have never done on this machine) - and it did - perfectly! Any ideas? Andrew (Shoreham) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/smug?hl=en-GB.
