[SirCastor]

I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but in the past week, my G4 suddenly has decided to stop reading discs. No Audio CDs, data CDs, Movie DVDs, data DVDs, nothing. I'll stick a disc in, it'll sit for 5-10 seconds, and then just spit it back out.

I can identify two possibilities, but I can't really explain either of them:

1) I burned a copy of Ubuntu Linux, and tried to boot it. It spun and spun and spun, and after a while, I gave up and hit the reset button on the front of the tower.

2) There was a security update a day or two ago.

It's not the factory DVD drive, it's a Pioneer 109. Shows up fine in System Profiler. Any ideas?

[reader50]

Boot from the other partition, to see if it's an OS-specific issue. That would isolate the security update too, assuming you didn't apply it to the backup partition yet.

No 2nd partition? oops. Create another user account, try from there. Do a permissions repair & reboot too. It may do nothing, but it's easy to try.

Try to boot from the optical drive, assuming you have a disk that can boot your upgraded system.