DVD burned on new Mac not work on old Mac

This might not be the reason, but I've noticed that some older DVD-ROM (or DVD-RAM, acutally) drives have trouble reading certain types of DVD-R or -RW media. I had the same problem with early CD-Rs; the blue Verbatim ones wouldn't read in a lot of older CD drives.

It could also just be dirty and/or failing--it's pretty old, after all.

You might try a different brand of discs, or maybe just replace the old DVD-ROM drive with a newer one--heck, you can get a brand new DVD-/+RW drive for like $35 now.

Could it be your DVD-ROM drive only reads DVD-Rs, and you burned a DVD+R on your MBPro?

Lincoln 6 Echo said:

I'm thinking the old drive doesn't like certain brands of DVD media, but it reads every store bought music CD and movie DVD I've put in it.

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You're probably right about this. Manufactured discs are more reflective than burned ones, so they are more reliably read by older drives; the older drives were designed before the writable discs were common (or even existed, in some cases), so they were only designed to read the more reflective pressed discs. Similarly, if a particular brand is less reflective than another, it might fail to be read--again, I mention the older blue Verbatim CD-R media versus, say, Sony's, which was a more reflective green; my CD player and older computer's CD-ROM drive would only read the Sony discs.

Lincoln 6 Echo said:

Should I replace the internal or buy an external?

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Either will work fine, but if you replace the internal you save the ~$30 or so on a 5.25" FireWire case. Of course, the flip side is that you can plug the external into both computers easily, but since you've already got a burner in your newer one, it's probably not that big of a deal. Me, I'd probably go internal just 'cause I'm cheap.

Out of curiosity, what are the brands of blank discs that are unreadable by your old drive?