Installed new Pioneer Drive - Only Toast works!

[Derek]

I just put in the new Pioneer DVR-710 16x dvd drive and I put a wedding dvd in that I burned and it played back fine. Went to burn a .dmg in Disk Utility, and the burn button is grayed out. The disk won't show up in the finder window, DVDSP doesn't recognize it BUT Toast will. I was actually able to burn a .dmg using toast.

Now when I go to "about this mac" it recognizes the drive but under disc burning it says "not supported" but the disk type says "cd-rw/dvd-rw.

Why wont it work? Rat Vega can you help me out here? Do I need a firmware update or what?

Thanks
Derek

[RatVega]

You don't mention what Mac model and OS level you're using so all this is a bit "generic".

Unless I miss my guess, what you actually have is a DVR-111D that was retail packaged as a DVR-710 (without any mention of Mac compatibility.)

This shouldn't be a problem...

This drive has been installed in a number of G4 and G5 models without problem. The latest firmware version should be V1.23. It shows up as "unsupported" on some systems but works fine anyway. I think comes from the fact that OS X Tiger brought in iApps support. You may be able to burn from iDVD, etc. even if you can't from Disk Utility. Toast doesn't rely on OS X utilities so it pretty much always works.

If you can't get the drive to mount or burn, try using Patchburn 4.0.1 (http://www.patchburn.de).

Respond with more system info and we can really dig into this...

[Derek]

Sorry I forgot that vital info!

G5 single 1.8ghz 1gig O' Ram
10.3.9 OS

[RatVega]

OK, the OS level makes me think you'll want to use Patchburn to get the drive recognized. It's freeware, but considering the excellent deal you probably got on the drive you may want to donate a few bucks to the author if it fixes the problem.

Users have instlled this drive on Tiger (10.4.x) without Patchburn, so upgrading to Tiger has one more benefit in your case.

[Derek]

When I get home tonight I will try Patchburn and see if that cures my problem. I've been wanting to upgrade to Tiger on that machine but just haven't made the time for it. Actually I want to do a clean install on the second internal drive, then eventually wipe the other drive clean to sort of start from scratch since its been 3 years since I recieved the G5.

Thanks for the help and I'll let you know if I have any other problems.

Thanks
Derek

[Derek]

That worked great! Thanks so much. At first when I couldn't get it to work, I immediatly thought of "RatVega"

You are da man!