Optical drive rejects DVDs

I realize that there are postings about this problem elsewhere in these discussions, but the suggested solutions seem to refer to Powerbooks and iBooks, so I want to ask about it again in connection with my eMac. My optical drive plays commercial DVDs with absolutely no difficulties, but when I insert a DVD made from a blank disk, the disk is often ejected after a few seconds. One particular DVD, which was not made by a private individual, but was made for sale by an art gallery, is always rejected and I cannot play it.

I have carefully cleaned the problem disk and I have cleaned the lens of the optical drive. The details of the drive are: Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-107D; this is, I realize, an old model, but it was installed by an Apple-authorized repairer only a year or two ago to replace the original one which had become faulty,and it has not had all that much use.

I should be grateful for suggestions.

Posted on May 20, 2011 12:20 PM

33 replies

May 26, 2011 4:57 AM in response to Michael Graubart

I'm glad that at last you succeed in upgrading the firmware and at the same time sorry that didn't solve your problem.

But I hope there is still a chance that as soon as you burn new discs they won't be ejected any more 😉

May 26, 2011 11:11 AM in response to Alberto Ravasio

It turned out differently, I am afraid. When the 1.21 upgrade did not solve my original problem, I decided to try a further upgrade to 1.22. It should have been possible to do so just with the 'normal' 1.22 file despite the fact that the kernel file now installed is 1.21, but it did not work and I then made the grave mistake of trying to drag both the 1.22 normal file and the 1.21 kernel file into Terminal when using DVRFlash. The result is that the drive now does not work at all (the message says it cannot be opened) and all attempts to go back to 1.21 by using -f or -ff and both 1.21 files failed. In any case I now think that the problem with the drive may have been hardware-related.

I should now be grateful for advice and recommendations (a) for a replacement built-in optical drive that is more up-to-date than the Pioneer DVR-107D; or alternatively (b) for a good but not too expensive external USB drive, using a separate mains supply (unlike, for example, the Samsung SE-S084F External USB 2.0 Slimline 8X DVD Writer),because I have not got enough spare USB sockets. I need to be able both to record and to play CDs and DVDs (audio, video and data) and whatever drive it is, internal or external, has to be compatible with my eMac G4 with OS X 10.4.11.

Jun 1, 2011 11:34 AM in response to Michael Graubart

I now know more about what sort of drive I need.

I now realize that I need one with a FireWire connection rather than a USB one, because I understand that I would not be able to boot from a CD or DVD (e.g. when using DiskWarrior) via USB.

And I would prefer a relatively small one because I have very little desk space.

Finally (or firstly, really), it has to work on a PPC G4 with OS 10.4.11.,

I should really be very grateful for advice.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Optical drive rejects DVDs