MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-85J

You could try Verbatim discs, they seem to be the most compatible blanks. Have you managed to successfully burn even one disc? If you haven't try repairing permissions and/or running the hardware test from your install discs. If this doesn't improve your situation call Applecare. If, however you have managed to burn some discs all Applecare will offer is the usual run through of tests. We have three machines with Matshita drives in them and all of them are so temperamental that we now use external Pioneer firewire burners. The Matshita drive on the MBP I am using now has a 90% success rate with burning cdrs with iTunes but an equal rate of failures when burning dvdrs and I've given up trying to fathom out why this is. The Pioneers have 100% success rate of burning anything we have chucked at them and we have been using them for 9 months now. There are plenty of reports on the web of the Matshita drive's performance failures, here's one recent thread.
Hopefully the use of Verbatim blanks and repairing permissions will solve your woes.

Open Disk Utility (located in the Utilities folder), select your hard drive in the window on the left and click on the button marked Repair Disk Permissions.

Hi JoSark , i have the same MBP and same opt.drive.it stopped writing n reading DLayer DVDs.so took it apart with instructions from iFixit.com and blasted the lens with an air can.its working perfect now.using Leopard.if you dont want to open up ur comp then the lens rests at the bottom left corner of the drive. that is the bottom right corner of the mouse button.if you draw a 1 inch line from this corner of the track pad button in a 3:30 clock direction with a pencil, thats where it is. get a dustoff can with a pipe or long nozzel, insert it into the slot and give a few blasts. taking care not to bump hard into anything inside. worked for me. but dont touch or clean the lens with any sort of contact. hope this helps.

Hi-

Sorry to jump into this discussion so late but I want to replace the UJ-857E "stoopid drive" with a UJ-85J so I can write to DVD-RAM, which I use extensively in my work. I have the drive, and the install instructions from youfixit. Doesn't look too daunting (except that my MacBook is two weeks old<g>). My real concern is will I need any Panasonic drivers for this to work in the OSX environment? I put the drives in all my PC laptops and the went in and worked perfectly in the XP SP2 environment.

No one (NO ONE!) at Apple has been able to give me the straight answer on this even when I ask if they would install the drive. "Mac aren't to be messed about with." It's my one real ***** after coming over from PC. If you don't like the whole entire system the way it is shipped, TOO BAD!

Thanks for any insight.

D.

Given that the MBP is almost brand new and that the drive is really awful, you should be able to get it replaced under warranty. If you try to do the swap yourself, you will void the warranty, beware. FWIW, my 6-week-old MBP came with a LG Superdrive that has worked ok so far, even with DL DVDs.

tourtelot, rather than replacing the internal drive, why don't you simply buy an external FW burner, or install a tray load drive in an external FW enclosure.

I doubt that you will have any driver problems with the UJ-85J , but an external tray loading FW drive will be MUCH faster both reading and burning both for use with CD's and DVD's than the UJ85J.

Cheers

Rod