The Problem With Optical Drives …

Hmmm …

Bloody things …

Do you remember me writing, on Saturday, ever since the installation of a recent security patch, that I’d been getting problems with both my interior and exterior optical drives?

Well, there was a thing or two I tried, after mooching around on the various Apple discussion forums, devoted to the Mini: and it seems I wasn’t the only one to get this sort of issue.

The Mini’s optical drives are notoriously touchy, and have been for years.

But, treated with a certain amount of care, they’re a nice, usable piece of kit.

However, after the security patch was installed, the interior optical drive on the Mini — the interior drive in particular, although this has affected the exterior DVD/CD burner — has been refusing to burn data to DVD.

It’ll read the install disc, happily: it’s how I was able to do a Permissions repair, just recently.

When I checked on the Apple forums, it seems quite a few people had been having similar problems. Both with the interior drives on the Mini, and iMac, and all, seemingly at about the same sort of time, and all involving Mac OS X 10.6.2: with one or two involving both Tiger, and Leopard; Mac OS X 10.4.x and 10.5.x, respectively.

Now, having cleaned both burners, I’m still — still — having trouble with the interior drive — a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-K06 — on the Mini, but was able to burn an Ubuntu Studio alternate install disc* on the exterior drive: again, following one the thread posters suggestions to clean the drives, and to plug and unplug it, when not in use.

So, as you can imagine, this isn’t something I’m too happy about.

Nor have I — as yet — seen anything updates, by Apple, that could relate to this.

Frustrating, isn’t it?

Next step, hardware test …

* Shame the actual .iso file was blank: probably why the resulting disc I asked Movie Night Adrian to check for me, turned out to be a nice, shiny coaster. Which was weird. Using the exterior drive — a NEC DVD_RW ND-2510A — to burn the .iso file in question seemed to work, as you can tell from the attached photos. However, when I checked the original I had on an external hard drive I use for storage … I found it was empty. Bit of a git, that …