Cannot Burn CD-R on Snow Leopard - iMac

What can I check? Would a lens cleaner help? Which are the best to use in this situation? Why is it that CD-Rs are my only issue and not DVD-Rs?

The first thing in these cases is always to go to different media...always.

The second it a lens cleaner, yes - cheap, easy to use and just the ticket for getting the feetprints of little holiday bunnies cleaned off that lens 🙂 Especially if there are smokers in the house.

I would try using a CD lens cleaner disc first to deal with any dust bunnies, 2nd hand smoke glaze, etc., before I faulted the new OS specifically. On internal optical drives as shipped from Apple you should be ok - on external optical drives/burners from 3rd party vendors, know that many of us have been forced to abandon those units, at least for the time being.

Good news is new ones are fairly low cost (unless you're looking for Blue Ray support), so replacing a unit with (Snow Leopard) incompatible firmware isn't that big of a hurdle....just be sure to keep the receipt on anything new you bring home 🙂

I posted this on another board here (in an iMac topic as well --- but I'm using a MacBook!)...and since last week I've been getting the same errors. I did the standard OSX troubleshooting (reboot, repair permissions, repair disk, reset PRAM, clear the caches, etc.), and the best I ever got was hit-and-miss. Tried a lens cleaner as well as a can of compressed air, and still hit-and-miss (mostly miss).

However -- on my end, at least, I know it's a SOFTWARE issue. Why? Because I have my MacBook dual-booting with Ubuntu Linux. On the Linux side, I have ZERO issues burning. On the OSX side, however, I keep getting those media errors (regardless of the make, model, or type of media).

Can I just boot into Linux when I want to burn a CD? Yeah, but I'd rather not.

I take it back -- for me, it's a hardware issue. 😟 I started to theorize that maybe my SuperDrive is overheating, and when I boot into Linux maybe the time it takes to shut down the MacBook and reboot into Ubuntu is just enough time for the drive to cool off enough so that it'd burn CDs.

So, last night I tried something: my goal was basically to run the **** out of the MacBook in Linux and see if I could still burn. I booted and was able to burn two CDs, then had a problem with a third, then a fourth worked, and then my fifth attempt was nothing but failure. Got all kinds of errors no matter what brand of CD-R I tried.

I don't have AppleCare -- I used Best Buy's extended warranty instead. (That has saved my butt on many occasions, including at least one time when they didn't really have to honor it.) Unfortunately, that probably means they'll have to ship my MacBook to California for service. (That's my only gripe about Best Buy -- you could bring something to their techs and want something as simple as a piece of tape removed from, say, the strap on your digital camera and they'll send it to California...)

I've had my MacBook nearly two years -- I still have it in my possession but I'm already going through withdrawal in expectation of being without it...

can you tell us which lens cleaner you selected, please?

i am having a very similar problem: post Snow Leopard, both of my macs are failing when trying to burn DVDs. never had issues before..


thanks!
matt