Short:
DVD burner working less than intermittently and Sony informs me that I am not covered under Warranty the second I mention that I'm on a Macintosh.
Long:
I purchased a Sony DRU-510A in November of 2003 for use with my Powerbook, and had problems getting it to burn both CD-R and DVD-R media. At first I thought it was the discs I was using so I purchased two or three different brands of media still with no luck. I narrowed it down to being the Firewire case that I had stuck the, otherwise internal, drive in. I bought a new ADS Tech Firewire enclosure and stuck the drive in it.
With this new case I was able to burn about five discs total of types: CD-R, DVD-R, and DVD-RW. Ever since January or so the drive has ceased to function more than intermittently on several machines, both Mac and PC. Now all the drive manages to do is make clicking sounds when reading, and stall the Operating System when trying to burn with Toast Titanium 6 on Panther. Over the course of the last few months I have gotten a slew of errors in Toast when trying to write and erase DVD media including Buffer underruns, a range of sense key errors, "Unit Attention" errors, and the drive not being detected by the Operating System at all.
Being fairly busy I never had time to call to pursue anything regarding Sony's warranty until yesterday when I got ahold of "Dawn" on the Sony support website via a support chatroom. When I mentioned that I was on a Macintosh she promptly divulged that this drive was only supported on Windows. Screw that.
Ok, so I understand where they're coming from in that, for all they know, I could be some red neck with no clue how to work this thing and just trying to take them for all they've got. What's frustrating is that I'm a rather technically minded person, and this drive just doesn't work. So basically I'm out $200 or so... Yuck.
Check out this log of my chat session with "Dawn":
http://thefro.homeunix.org/~aorth/sony_sucks.txt
It's covered under the warranty until November of 2004, what should be my course of action?
Top
