iMac CD burning woes...

ryanyboy

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Hi all,

I have this weird problem with my iMac. Sometimes when I try to burn images to disc I put the DVD in and the iMac spits it back out again. At first I assumed it was a dodgy disc so I'd throw them away. However I recently realised that I can try again an hour later with the same blank DVD and it works fine.

My theory is that it has something to do with heat. As it can work perfectly if I try again when the iMac has been in standby mode (and thus cooled down).

Anyone else encountered this?
 
I've never had this on my old iMac but have experienced it on my daughters old white MacBook, apparently a cleaner disc helps. We trundled on with it as ours was similar and would work sometimes and not others. We now have an iMac and macbookpro without disk drives and purchased the separate SuperDrive
 
Wonder if your drives is playing up - whether it is heat related or just starting to play up ?

I've a friend who's internal drive used to do similar and he also found it might not play / write properly - gave up in the end and he bought a separate external DVD drive and had no further issues.
 
I would just buy an external, USB, DVD drive and use that instead. As long as you don't buy the expensive Apple Superdrive, these work just fine and are not expensive.
 
Thanks for the help guys. I'll buy an external drive as this one is wasting me too much time!
 
The CD drives on iMacs are notorious for packing in. The Samsung works fine.
 
Used to happen occasionally with my macbook too. I think the firmware for the drives was quite poor to begin, and got better with updates along the way (used to reject about 80% of DVDs that played fine on anything running a different OS).
 
I'll be ordering one too. My dvd drive packed up at some point in the last year I think but I don't really use DVDs so I didn't notice. Came to put a CD onto itunes and that's when I discovered it didn't read them any more. Annoyingly it was just after I had an out of warranty repair on the screen and USB ports so had I noticed I could have that sorted at the same time.
 
I have had all these problems with iMac's. My previous one had a built in disc drive and my present one has a Apple super drive externally. It does seem to be a problem with iMac's and cd/dvd burning, I have also found that it will not burn at all to the cheaper cd/dvd's (Tesco type). My previous one with the built in disc drive went back to Apple for repair for the problem and it was still not completely cured. I found the only chance of the iMac burning was to use Verbatim cd/dvd's. Found the only really safe way was to use memory sticks.
 
My iMac late 2011 has built in superdrive and ive never had a problem even after ripping nearly 500 cds on to iTunes
 
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