[Charles Reader]

I wrestled with where to post this, eventually deciding to post it in the hardware forum for PowerMacs since this is a PowerMac clone and I'm reasonably sure it's a hardware problem. I have a customer who's in love with and old Power Computing PowerWave. She lets her kids play games on the computer but the CD drive in the computer refuses to mount certain game CDs. The computer is running Mac OS 9.1 and the CD drive is connected via a SCSI connection. I loaded SCSI Probe-remember that?-and it could see the disk in the drive but claimed that the unmountable disks had an "invalid logical block". I took one of the disks to my office, booted a G4 tower there into 9.1 from an external SCSI disk I have for other purposes and the CD mounted just fine. I took the external SCSI HD back to her house, attached it to the back of her computer and booted off of it. The CD refused to mount. Since the OS software mounted the CD on a different set of hardware I'm forced to conclude that it's a hardware problem. Has anybody seen this sort of problem?

[Detrius]

Over time, the laser gets a little bit off on optical drives (this includes your portable CD player and home theater DVD player). As this happens, it gets more and more difficult to read discs.

[Napier]

Originally posted by Charles Reader:
I wrestled with where to post this, eventually deciding to post it in the hardware forum for PowerMacs since this is a PowerMac clone and I'm reasonably sure it's a hardware problem. I have a customer who's in love with and old Power Computing PowerWave. She lets her kids play games on the computer but the CD drive in the computer refuses to mount certain game CDs.

You probably need a hacked Apple CD/DVD Driver. I think most of the clones CD drives were not made by Apple, so if you're not using the original Power Computing version of the operating system you'll need the hacked driver. My PowerTower 225's CD drive wouldn't work with the Mac OS 9 CD/DVD Driver but works great with the hacked one.

You can find the hacked version doing a search in the Message Boards at http://www.powerwatch.com/ or I can email it to you.

Good Luck