Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Sirfishalot · Oct 18, 2003, 09:58 AM

My G4 has been acting very strange lately. I am running 10.1.5 on one HD and 9.0.3 on the other.
I replaced the stock DVD drive with a Lite-On 40x burner last year. Just recently I was experiencing a kernel panic where the system would just hang upon startup and not be able to complete the process.
Re-installed the system after formatting the drive that contained OSX. Seems to be working OK except when booting up the CDRW tray opens then closes on its own!
And every so often I cannot eject a disc either with the keyboard button, or the button on the bezel & if try to select the disc icon for cmd-E it dissapears. Very strange. Also, sometimes the machine will not shut down on command. I just get the blue screen w/spinning icon and have to shut down by holding the power button.
Any ideas? I'll be glad when my new 15 Powerbook comes.

Thanks

tr · Oct 18, 2003, 02:10 PM

is that lite-on compatible? i know people have had luck with them, but i don't know what specific models. have you tried putting back the old DVD-ROM, and see if the system acts okay? i mean, it seems all this trouble started with the CDRW, so the first thing you should do is take it out, and see if everything is normal.

i mean, for all you know, you got a bum drive, and that's what the problem is.

tr

BurpetheadX · Oct 19, 2003, 06:42 PM

If it's not a Apple drive, don't expect it to work properly with eject functions. And why don't you update OS 9 to 9.2.2?

tr · Oct 19, 2003, 08:27 PM

yeah, just checkedthe drive database on www.xlr8yourmac.com, and the only way people have gotten the lite-on's to work okay is to patch a drive plug-in, which is actually pretty easy using Patchburn.

you should check out this site, and do a search for compatible drives. (just don't choose a brand to get a list of all compatible drives regardless of make)

one that comes up that seems pretty good is the LG GCC-4480B (48x24x48x + 16x DVD-ROM). works native under 10.2.8.

tr

ginoledesma · Oct 22, 2003, 06:07 AM

I have a Lite-on 52x24x52 CD-RW drive and it works really well on my G4/400. I did get the odd "open/close CD tray behavior on startup", but the cause for that (in my case) was a failing PRAM battery. The eject command doesn't work under Mac OS 9.x (although the eject button does), but under Mac OS 10.x it works without problems.