[lngtones]

Earlier on I posted about troubles with my old dvd drive and all the replies claimed it was a dying drive. So I took the plunge and ordered a PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-106D (Copied from System Profiler) and put it in. Everything seems to work great with the drive except I'm still getting one problem. It seems like after I use the drive once it will stop responding until I restart. After I restart everything is fine for a little while and then it goes silent again. If I hold down the eject key the bezel pops up, but the drive doesn't eject. It disappears from the Finder and won't come back, but doesn't actually eject. It also disappears from Disk Utility. This is pretty annoying because it effectively limits me to one CD per restart. I had this same exact problem with my previous drive as well, except the previous drive rarely was able to read any CD at all. Does anyone have an idea of what could cause this?

[psisquared]

Yes, this is a common problem with Pioneer drives under 10.2.x. Apple must have a different firmware or ROM in their units that allows them to operate correctly under 10.2.x. Upgrading to 10.3 completely solves the problem with aftermarket Pioneer drives (as I can attest to), but I haven't heard of any other solutions under 10.2x.

Originally posted by lngtones:
Earlier on I posted about troubles with my old dvd drive and all the replies claimed it was a dying drive. So I took the plunge and ordered a PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-106D (Copied from System Profiler) and put it in. Everything seems to work great with the drive except I'm still getting one problem. It seems like after I use the drive once it will stop responding until I restart. After I restart everything is fine for a little while and then it goes silent again. If I hold down the eject key the bezel pops up, but the drive doesn't eject. It disappears from the Finder and won't come back, but doesn't actually eject. It also disappears from Disk Utility. This is pretty annoying because it effectively limits me to one CD per restart. I had this same exact problem with my previous drive as well, except the previous drive rarely was able to read any CD at all. Does anyone have an idea of what could cause this?

[lngtones]

Originally posted by psisquared:
Yes, this is a common problem with Pioneer drives under 10.2.x. Apple must have a different firmware or ROM in their units that allows them to operate correctly under 10.2.x. Upgrading to 10.3 completely solves the problem with aftermarket Pioneer drives (as I can attest to), but I haven't heard of any other solutions under 10.2x.

I'm running 10.3.2 on a Quicksilver 867 so I don't think that is the problem.

[tr]

do you happen to have "set drives to sleep" in sys prefs? with earlier models of the pioneer superdrive (and some have reported with the later models), there seems to be a bug that setting your drives to sleep will cause the superdrive to sleep, but then not wake up. i've had similar problems to yours: when drives set to sleep, if i wait long enough, the pioneer DVR-A03 in my G4 450 will not respond. hitting the eject key on the keyboard shows 'eject' on the screen, but nothing happens. turning off the 'set drives to sleep' preference cures it for me.

i'm running a G4 450 with a pioneer DVR-A03 in X.3.2

tr

[lngtones]

I assume you mean "put hard disks to sleep." I'll turn it off and see if that improves it, thanks. The only thing I don't understand is that it started happening to my old drive too. It could have been right around Panther was installed. It never did that for two years and then all of a sudden...

[the weatherman]

I thik this is a Panther problem as I have another brand installed on my machine–an Optoriter DVD r/rw and I do encounter the same problem. I have set my MDD not to sleep but occassionally the drive will still go to sleep/dissappear but it does return if you wait. Although sometimes a restart is still neccessary.