Hi,
I have a recently purchased a BTO Dual 867 (Mirrored door) PowerPC G4 running OS X 10.2.4 with an 80 GB HD and 1 GB RAM and, of course, a Superdrive (Pioneer DVR-104).
I seem to be consistently unable to write DVDs longer than 2.3 GB and I'm trying to discover whether this is due to a hardware fault, disk fragmentation or something else. Your help would be very much appreciated.
Firstly, I have been using Toast Titanium 5.2, Finder and iDVD to write DVDs. Every time I have written a data DVD it has failed on verification near the end of the disk. The result has been that some files on the resulting DVD cannot be opened or copied and cause the Finder to freeze.
I should point out that I have about 2.4 GB of data to backup.
Secondly, I have been using iMovie 2 and iDVD 2 to try and write a couple of almost 90 minute DVDs. The resultant DVDs play back perfectly for the first 60 minutes but then fail between 60 and 70 minutes, with the picture breaking up and large expanses of black (which I take to be the DVD player failing to get any lock on the disk.)
I have so far lost six DVD-R blanks.
After the first few failures I called Apple support and their response was "defrag the hard drive and ensure there is enough space on it for a swap file" but were unsure what amount of space needed to be available (one person said 25 GB, one person said 10 GB).
I repartitioned my Mac, with two partitions of 35 GB and one of 10 GB. This left me with at least 30 GB available for burning on two seperate partitions (one is the startup volume, one is scratch).
I then meticulously output the iMovie quicktime file to the scratch partition, defragged all partitions (using Alsoft PlusOptimizer 1.3), and got iDVD to work using the startup volume.
The ONLY success I have had thus far has been writing a 2.37 GB data DVD using the Finder right after defragging the startup volume. Toast continues to fail when writing data DVDs.
So I have a few questions;
1. Should my BTO Mac be able to write 90 minute DVDs given the above spec?
2. Would the fact that the DVDs written consistently suffer problems after about 1 hour (or 2.3 GB) indicate a DVD writer hardware fault, disk fragmentation, lack of disk space or other problem?
3. Is 30 GB enough to write a 90 minute DVD? (The reason I use three partitions is to keep the work, scratch and startup volumes seperate.)
OK, sorry about the long post. I'd really appreciate any advice, help or observations. My next step will be to try and write a full 4.7 GB data DVD.
Thanks
John B
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