After burning 20 or so DVD coasters, buffer underruns, and blank check failures a much balder version of me decided that the issue was looking more and more like it was the DVR-104a that came with the machine and not media, or software. Faced with the loss of being without burn support from all the iLife apps and iTunes I was at a crossroads. Upgrade to a non-Apple drive would mean that I loose all the integrated burn support, (right!) and spending $90 on a refurb'd drive that only burned at 1x was a little crazy. I went down the firmware path and really considered overwriting the Apple firmware but stopped short of that when a trip to a local office supply store sparked what can only be described as devine intervention. While in the store I mentioned the problem I had encountered to one of the techs. Amazingly enough this was a Mac friendly person, who as irony would have it had the same issue with an iMac. His solution was to replace the SuperDrive with a regular Sony CD-RW, DVD. All the iLife apps worked fine he said, since Tiger. Hmm... Could this be true.. Has Apple lightened up on the firmware check now that DVD-R's are more common? Hmm.. After all I have complete support for my Sony 195E CD-RW, and haven't had to play with the the devce-plugin file in over a year. Hmm... since Apple now get's the SuperDrives from many different manufacturers (not just Pioneer) could it be this easy? Well I was going to find out. $79.95 later I had a Sony DRU-810A, an hour after that I'm back in business. Everything works including TOAST!!. As of the writing of this the only thing I haven't tried is the DL (DUAL LAYER) support from Toast. All iApps work like a charm. I've only got 4x media and thus have only burned 4x in a DVD but heck it worked. I will mention that you don't want to try and reformat the old media you had problems with in the old Superdrive. Upon looking at the media it would appear that it was stripped (0's written to all sectors).
Results may vary, take this with a grain of salt and be realistic, not EVERY DRIVE will work. Not responsible for the info in this or any blog on this site.
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