Mac mini: Unable to erase or format DVD RAM Side B

I can’t find any info or specs on that drive at HP. “We’re sorry” pages, at best.

Closest I can find is dvd1040e, which is about fourteen years old.

Which probably means the ”d” is yet older.

I did find a report from ~17 years ago, indicating the dvd1040d could sometimes have issues reliably detecting media:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2449940/my-dvd-rw-seems-to-be-intermittent-in-detecting-dv

Try your spare DVD drive, and see if that works better.

The media shows as DVD-ROM. That’s not going to record.

VLC can (apparently) record DVD-RAM, but OS X itself lost that ability somewhere round the migration from PPC to Intel, if not earlier. An add-on recording app is required.

It's a 2-sided disc. Did you flip the disc over in the burner before trying to format Side B?

H AND J wrote:

Thanks. Noticed that too. (DVD-ROM). Firmware updates needed?

Know of any DVD RAM disc utilities?

Thx, JMH :)

Corel Roxio Toast can probably record your project, as DVD-RAM is listed in the user documentation, as can the cdrtools open-source project.

I wrote vendor tools for burning CD and DVD media, but that design and development work was not for OS X. Some of the devices and some of the media itself were seriously flaky too, and some with truly wonderful (hardware or firmware) bugs. (Read: verify what you burn is what you think you burned.)

I’m using other methods of archival in more recent times, and not optical media. This given the trends with optical storage devices, and optical media, and apps.

Those specs are for dvd1040e, while your screenshots show dvd1040d.

Load your spare DVD drive, and test with that.

How old are these discs? It is possible they have degraded over time. Even if they are brand new, they may be made of lesser quality than back in the day or they may have been sitting in a warehouse for a long time before being sold.

H AND J wrote:

Would imagine that from one revision to the next, that there is not much of a difference.

I’ve seen big variations within the same model number without even a revision change, and have met different bridge chips within the same HP DVDs thst worked, and others within the supposedly-same model that didn’t.

I’ve met latent firmware bugs in one series of HP ‘DVD drive, too.

Unless the vendor sells the devices as all being exactly identical, don’t assume it. (Old IT joke: “compatible” is a technical term that means “different”, because if there were no differences, it’d be called “identical”.)

LG BD Rewriter is up next to check that the media is GO or NO GO.

Excellent. You’re also headed for testing with different optical media, as well.

Best and most reliable and most consistent optical drives I met back in that era were Plextor.

H AND J wrote:

The mobile is sounding better and better. If remember correctly, there was a format called UDF (Universal Disc Format, like HFS+). External HDD or SSD drives?

UDF is a common file system format, and is the follow-on to the ISO-9660 file system.

This format is used on video DVDs, and on Blu-ray disks, among other places.

UDF and ISO-9660 are not relevant to the recording process itself as that laser-focuses on getting bits into pits, but can be entirely relevant to the mastering process and to what gets recorded.

On a side note, Apple never did support Blu-ray in any form (read only or any kind a recordable).

Have a couple BD-R/BD-RE disc. Probably not supported by Disk Utility?

Look up the “bag of hurt” quote from Steve Jobs. Licensing-related things haven’t appreciably improved AFAICT, though things eventually did behind one media format. Arguably far too late.

Would probably have to go third party software.

For playing and for recording Blu-ray or HD DVD (R.I.P.) media, yes, you will need third-party apps.

Apple retired their iDVD tooling long ago.

What brand discs are you using?

Store information on CD and DVD discs on Mac - Apple Support

Use external drive(s) for archiving, storing and backups.

Sell those DVDs on E-Bay or build a Mobile.