mike1210

Right I dont know much about macs so bear with me

We have 4 mac's that wont burn cd's with the standard OS software and sometimes wont mount cd's either. We have tried to clean the drives and this hasnt helped, they have recently been upgraded to Tiger and this hasn't helped either, there were no messages saying that the firmware was too old. They are power G4's. Can you guys think of anything that may be causing this

Edited to add 3 the macs also crash when trying to burn on the off chance that they do mount with an error code, i did a search for this code but the answers on the net were many varied.

class_A

Are they running any anti-virus software? Can you burn audio discs through iTunes?

mike1210

not at the time however they have symantec anti-virus 10 on them now. they can burn via toast but 1 mac won't mount blank cd's and the others can sometimes mount but give an error code when trying to burn saying a communication error has occured, i havent tired with itunes but they are corporate macs and i dont think they use it.

class_A

iTunes uses the Disc Burner engine included as part of the OS, so if you cannot burn using that but can with Toast it sounds like you have a conflict somewhere. What version of Toast are you running? Have you applied the SuperDrive updates?

Markus

First up,
Make sure the machines are running 10.4.2 plus version 1.1 of the latest security update.

Then run DiskUtility and select the boot volume and click the "repair permissions" option. Let it run through things and then reboot the computer.

Try inserting a cd and see what happens. If it gives an error can you note down exactly what the error dialog says.

How are the machines logged in? Are they set to automatically login, if so, is it an Administrator account or a standard account? It might be a permission problem with an Admin vs standard account, but I doubt it.

Are you running any protection software on the machines? If so, what is, and if you can disable it, do that, then see if there is an issue.

angrynorth

Saw something like this the other day, it has something to do with 10.4.1 and the finder. The fix seems to be as simple as updating to 10.4.2.

Some other people mentioned zapping the PRAM (Command-Option-P-R during restart) too but I personally would go with making sure you are up to date.

Markus

You could get wierdness if you're running MacAdministrator 3.1.6, and it's set to authenticate via AFP and obtain the user ID from the server, and the authenticating server happens to be running Active Directory.

I very much doubt you have that setup though

mike1210

we do have some Mac's that authenticate via active directory but these ones dont, cheers for the tips guys

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

this should help
find your drive make and model and part number.
make a note of your mac model and the os it is running.
then go to this link
mac drive firmware updates
enter the stuff in the drop down menus and find the firmware updates. you may need burnpatch tools which are all linked there.
run the firmware and any other osx updates, restart and then see if it all works

enjoy