Why can't I get the Mac to accept a dvd to play which it did yesterday evening?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Dirt, dust, or PRAM battery slowly getting old. If it is near 4 years of age, it is getting to the point it needs to be replaced. There are some dirt cleaners for slot loading drives. You can try some of the ones made for car stereos. http://www.macsales.com/ offers both internal and external DVD burner drives for iMacs.
Did you try another DVD to see if that works?
I did. It was blocked from the slot also. I noticed two new asterisk programs in my apps that I did not put in - for meeting people so I think I had malware put on my Mac by a History Channel dvd. I trashed them and still the disc would not load. No disc will.
Not necessarily malware, but possibly unintentional garbage.
Sony was caught a few years back selling music CDs with hidden software that installed a root kit in both Windows and Mac to prevent copying of any music CD. The root kits were badly written and caused systems to misbehave.
So while not likely, it's possible the History Channel DVD installed some kind of kernel extension that has trashed the systems ability to function as it's supposed to.
Mind you, I am throwing this out only because it has been done in the past and so is a possibility. But it would be way down on the list of likelihood.
Kurt,
Do you have any news article that discussed Sony's root kit? Cause that's a pretty serious problem, which means Sony owes a lot of us a replacement DVD drive.
Or at the very minimum, a way to disable that root kit. Cause I have a DVD drive that no longer reads random DVDs.
Hi a brody,
It's pretty well documented. Here's a Wikipedia article on the topic. Tons of other links to follow.
The drives themselves weren't damaged (by trying to do something like write to the drive's firmware), but the rootkit was installed on any computer you put a loaded disk in.
I had a couple of legally purchased CDs from that era, and they never played right. They would skip, stall and even spontaneously eject. And this was in various music CD players (home player, car), which the rootkit wasn't supposed to affect.
Or at the very minimum, a way to disable that root kit.
It's extremely difficult to do, or even detect. The idea of a rootkit is that they work below, and load into RAM before the kernel, so even the OS doesn't know it's there.
A rootkit can even be written to prevent the OS from finding it. You would just give it an odd, meaningless extension or name, and then the rootkit would instruct the OS to never show that name in any file listing by any app or utility. The only way to find them is to examine the drive from an uninfected computer that isn't being told to hide the file.
😠😠 $%$*($#% There I let off some $*&#%. Well better to know than not know. My wife's car CD player has been really flaky about CDs. At least I got her an iPhone, and we can get those CDs on that way. But seriously. Now that I'm aware of it, I'll be looking over each CD as I load it on her computer, which thankfully has not been "infected" with it so far. My iMac though just takes random looks at certain movies and spits them out.
"Music CDs should just be a collection of Wave files."
Actually, no. Music CDs are a continuous stream of data. Converting them to wave files would require a ripping software, i.e., iTunes set to import to an optional wav file format.
Sony took a lot of heat when it was discovered and stated they wouldn't be doing that anymore. But who knows, saying and doing is two different things.
Movie disks have so dang much copy protection on them that older players sometimes balk playing them back. Newer players have better, more compatible firmware to properly handle the copy protection without affecting playback.
Remember one of the old copy protection schemes of VHS tapes? If you copied the tape, the copy would play back with the scene getting lighter and darker. You could still watch it, but it was annoying enough that you wouldn't keep it. Problem was it also affected the legally purchased tape. Older VHS decks had problems playing the video in a way that didn't have scramble lines through it. Your first thought would be that the tracking was off, but no matter where you tried to set it, the video would still be distorted.
Why can't I get the Mac to accept a dvd which it did yesterday evening?
