Superdrive suddenly reads DVD and Audio CDs, but not CD-ROMs?!?!

[machan]

this is driving me crazy, mostly because i'd like to check apples discussion board for an answer to this but it's been dead for a day now.

anyway, here's the problem:

G4 933 w/ superdrive, OS 10.2.8

salesman asked me to copy some audio cds for him, put the first one in. "the best of the squirrel nut zippers". it's got audio and multimedia content (macromedia and quicktime). nowhere on the disc or jewel case does it say copy protected or anything out of the ordinary. ripped tracks to aac format in itunes. inserted blank cdr (which salesman provided, gold memorex cdr that apparently is a couple years old). itunes begins burning but never gets anywhere. after an hour decide to force quit and try again. had to restart the computer. cdr doesn't seem to have anything burned on it, but try a different disc anyway. same thing. gave up and went back to work. suddenly, my superdrive won't recognize data cdrs that customers send to us. also won't recognize the jaguar install cd, norton utilites or diskwarrior. basically it doesn't see cdroms AT ALL. dvds, however, mount and are accessible as normal. the superdrive shows as normal in system profiler. ran permission repair, started up G4933 in firewire target mode from 12" powerbook, can run permission repair and can run diskwarrior on the G4933 but cannot rebuild the directory (it's grayed out). rebooted G4933 as normal. restarted and zapped the pram. so far nothing is working. any ideas?

 

[Makosuke]

Weird one. I think, though I'm not sure, that the superdrive uses a different laser to read DVDs. If that were the case, it's possible that something happened to the CD laser, making it sensitive enough that it won't read or write data CDs. Or it could just be an odd hardware failure that causes it to act that way.

The other possibility I can think of is there's something wrong with the CD-ROM part of your OS install, causing it to choke on those discs, but discs with a different format (audio CD or DVD) work ok. I'm not quite clear from your description on whether you tried starting up from a CD and it didn't work, but if not that'd be an easy way to test whether it's software related.

 

[kettle]

Not so super superdrive

I noticed that the superdrive can't read typeII DVD RAM discs when removed from their cartridges.

Not that useful.
If you want to use that format.

 

[virividox]

but the dvd-r superdrives cant handle dvd-ram anyway it never said it could.

 

[machan]

you know, i thought i tried to restart from the Apple Hardware Test cd, but now that i think about it, i never put the cd in and force restarted from the button on the tower to see if i could get the cd to work....i'll have to try that tomorrow when i'm back at work. thanks!

 

[kettle]

Originally posted by virividox
but the dvd-r superdrives cant handle dvd-ram anyway it never said it could.

When a typeII DVD-RAM disk is removed from its case, it can be played as a DVD_ROM on generation 3 and above DVD drives.

The super drive should beable to read it. A 15"pBook with a combo drive can read them.

Super drive ain't that super.

 

[machan]

ok, i put the Apple Hardware Test Cd into the drive, it did not mount. i shut the computer down and restarted holding the "C" key. after a minute of gray screen, the drive ejected the disk and started up from the regular boot volume. it seems that i will not read any cdrom disk at all now. anyone have any ideas of a next step? how much does it cost to replace an internal superdrive?