Just like to know if anyone has any ideas on why when i put a blank dvd in my external dvd burner it comes back out and not burning,but when i put in a dvd with something on it ,it works fine,im on an ibook g4 with os x 10.3.9,any help would be great,thanks

Have you successfully burnt dvds in the past with this unit?
If so, Patchburn could help you.

http://www.patchburn.de/

If you have not burnt dvds in the past just check to make sure it burns dvds and is not Read Only.
There are loads of machines that burn CDs and only Read dvds.
Your System Profiler will give that detail.

thanks for that,ran patchburner now its saying vendor supported,any ideas what this means,but before i did that it was saying disk burning wasnt available,i have only burnt dvds with this burner on a widows machine in the past,also the disk still comes out,thanks.

Hard to say, (dunno), I would install Patchburn, restart and try a blank DVD again.
Been a while since I used Patchburn, but I don't think anything special happens... It just works.
Is it Firewire or USB?

Which DVD burner are you using.
What software are you trying to use with it?

The vendor supported that you see after running patchburn means that you can use that DVD burner to burn from Finder, iPhoto, iDVD etc. Without having vendor support status you can do none of those things.

Im using roxio toast 7,burner is on usb2,i know its a pioneer burner thats about it.

One other ting as well,just plugged in my external hard drive and same thing again it can read but not write.

Just saying it's a Pioneer burner does not tell us much so we can't be more helpful.
Under System Profiler what does it show about connected drives. It should show the model in there.
Are you using the correct discs with this DVD drive to write your files. You may even find that just going to another brand of DVD discs may work.

Stewie

Dylan, stewie is right, we do need a bit more information.

- What model of Pioneer burner is in the external case?
- What brand is the external case?
- Does the external case connect via USB or via FireWire?
- Is your external hard drive a Mac (HFS) volume, or is it a drive created on a Windows machine? (Windows' NTFS format is read-only under Mac OS X)


B.

i was wrong about it being a pioneer burner its actually a optorite DD0405 in a polar external case made by zynet, www.zynet.com.tw (theres no other info anywhere),its on usb2.i have installed the mac drivers for it and tried different makes of dvd-r and dvd+r`s.Also the external hard drive was formatted on a windows machine using NTFS,im only new to using mac`s and didnt know that an NTFS drive on a mac was a read only,(sorry bout that),

Well, for starters putting a burner on USB isn't the best solution with Macs -- ideally, you should use a FireWire based enclosure.

Secondly, after having a bit of a google on your Optorite, it doesn't seem to have a good reputation. What I think could have happened is that the actual write-laser in the drive has failed -- not an uncommon experience with DVD writers made in the last two years.

If you still have your PC around, and don't mind pulling things apart, I'd suggest removing the Optorite mechanism from its box and hooking it up to your PC's internal IDE bus and see if a Windows burning program (Nero, CDRwin, etc) can burn a disk with it. if you strike the same read-but-no-write problem, then the write-laser has indeed died.

All things considered, you can get bare DVD burners from most computer shops for under $50 now. Might be time for an upgrade anyway.


B.