The hard drive in my 17" 1st gen died a few weeks back. After replacing it (with the new Seagate Momentus 160GB drive) and reinstalling I started to burn off some DVDs of pictures I've taken. I found some old DVDs that hadn't worked in my drive before (the optical drive was incredibly finicky) and decided, what the heck, let's give it a whirl.
My optical drive recognized that a blank dvd-r had just been put in, something it had never done before. I am now burning it, something that has also never happened (since the drive never recognized a blank dvd-r, I never got this far). I'm 66% of the way through and hopefully haven't jinxed this whole process by posting this thread.
Am I the only one who's perplexed by this? This is one of the exact same DVDs I tried to use pre-hard drive failure in the same exact optical drive and got nowhere with. Why would changing a HD have any impact on my optical drive? Perhaps the new OS install on a clean drive? Or maybe my computer is thanking me for dropping 160GB of hard drive heaven into it? I can't figure it out.
Just to give some more information. I have a 17" 1st gen PB with 1GB of RAM running OSX 10.4.5 (I was up to 10.4.4 before hard drive death). My optical drive is cracked so I can burn DVDs at 2x (something I had done before my hard drive died). The discs in question are Verbatim DVD-R 1-16x speed. I'm burning Canon RAW files, JPGs and PSD.