New (well refurbished) iMac disk drive not working.

[Mac OS X Ocelot]

Less than a month ago I bought a refurbished iMac. I think the disk drive is messed up. I've been trying to put data on a DVD-RW and it always give me an error in the end with both the Finder and Toast 9. Some of the data burns, but some of it does not. Now I'm trying to copy a disk image to a CD-R and it simply won't burn at all with either Disk Utility or Toast. After a short amount of time, it ejects the disk and gives me a hardware error message and the disks is still blank and will still ask what to do when inserted. Is there anything I can do, or do I have to turn it in to Apple? If I have to turn it in, I will be without a computer for a week or so and I might as well have waited for them to update. Not to mention having to backup my files.

It should be noted that it reads disks just fine. Like games and stuff.

 

[Mac OS X Ocelot]

Sweet. Their online support site is telling me I can't just send it in for repairs. I have to take it to an Apple Retail Store, the nearest of which is an hour away. YAY!

 

[gnasher729]

Less than a month ago I bought a refurbished iMac. I think the disk drive is messed up. I've been trying to put data on a DVD-RW and it always give me an error in the end with both the Finder and Toast 9. Some of the data burns, but some of it does not. Now I'm trying to copy a disk image to a CD-R and it simply won't burn at all with either Disk Utility or Toast. After a short amount of time, it ejects the disk and gives me a hardware error message and the disks is still blank and will still ask what to do when inserted. Is there anything I can do, or do I have to turn it in to Apple? If I have to turn it in, I will be without a computer for a week or so and I might as well have waited for them to update. Not to mention having to backup my files.

There is a huge difference in the quality of writable CDs and DVDs. So if you got your media from a cheap source, that might be the problem and replacing the DVD writer wouldn't help there.

BTW. You absolutely MUST backup your files, whether you send that Mac in for repair or not. Every hard drive _will_ eventually fail. You can use any external hard drive; a cheap external hard drive with USB connector only will work just fine for this, and in the UK a 500GB external drive can be ordered for less than £60.

 

[oneEG6]

Sweet. Their online support site is telling me I can't just send it in for repairs. I have to take it to an Apple Retail Store, the nearest of which is an hour away. YAY!

A whole hour huh? Wow. Some of us are more than a few hours away. An hour is fairly close, especially for not having to go through the hassle of shipping such a large machine, and probably getting it back in under a week.

And yes, verify your issue is not the media, there's a lot of crappy media out there that will result in burn errors consistently.