iMac G4 Optical Drive partial (?) writing problem

[NeverGoBack88]

Greetings,

Wondering if anyone has experienced this, something similar, or any thoughts on the cause or a solution. At my wife's office, on an iMac G4, using Toast Titanium, the optical superdrive still writes audio and other format discs properly, but just recently began having consistent trouble writing data format discs to CD-R successfully. Latest symptom is the typical message that appears when a lead-in / lead-out writing error has occurred. On mine at home, that occurs every once in a great while and is assumedly the occasional bad CD media, solved by trying another. We all use similar models at home, are quite familiar with Toast software and have not had this trouble, machines are kept clean and utility maintenance software run regularly. It would seem very unusual to that 6 to 8 discs in a row would fail. Or is it? Thanks for reading!

 

[Christopher]

Do you have to use Toast? It could just be having a software hiccup, try using the Finder's burning feature or Disk Utility. For shits and giggles, try repairing permissions. After that I'd probably try either another OS X install(on another hard drive/partition) to see if OS X itself on the boot drive is screwed.

After that I would look into replacing the drive. If I'm wrong, someone else correct me.

 

[NeverGoBack88]

Hey thanks, Christopher. Using the OS' built-in burning feature was indeed my first suggestion in order to try to distinguish the issue between hardware and software, - and will be the missus' next step. They haven't run Disk Utility in over a month, (the following step...) and the problem just occurred more recently, so that'll be interesting to see if repairing permissions and/or the disk may solve it. I'm still trying to instill the proper regimen of disk maintenance, especially on a machine I don't have access to regularly. It's one thing to be the IT guy at home for the family, but once it's out of my "zip code" so to speak, others have to learn to be responsible... :

 

[zerotypeq]

Could be the actual drive going out look up how to tweak the laser if you wanna try saving it (or you don't have an extra drive to swap in and test out).

 

[NeverGoBack88]

Hello z,

Thanks for this, I can't say I'm technically experienced enough to have even imagined that if the drive may be on its way out that it would still write in some formats but not others, - seems unusual but I'll take it. Conversely, what does "tweak the laser" mean, how would you accomplish that, and to speed things up, where would one look that subject up? Thanks in advance. cheers!