Can't burn a CD on external drive on OS X...

October 1, 2005 5:26 PM

Problems burning a CD on an external drive using an iMac G3 600 with Tiger

Okay, so my mom has a g3 600 with 340mb ram. I plugged in an external firewire cd burner and tried to burn a disc (I'd yanked it out of a windows machine and stuck it in an enclosure). No dice. It tells me "Burning the disc failed because communication to the disc drive failed (Error code 0x80020022)."

I figured it was the drive was too old or crap. So today I went and bought a USB 1.1 drive off some guy who had it hooked up to a slower G3 iMac (I think it was a 300). This is a Lacie 4x4x24 external drive.

I get the same damn error.

When I bring up the Get Info box on the CD after it gives me the error, the disc is locked and I can't unlock it (it's greyed). It also tells me the capacity is zero kb (though it was empty when I checked the info before trying to burn it).

I went to Lacie's site to see if there were any drivers. Nope. Either it's too old or doesn't need them.

The drive appears in the iMac's system Profile under "Disc Burning" as

Firmware Revision 3.0D
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Supported)
Cd-Write: -R, -RW
Write Strategies : cd-tao
Media: No.

WTF? I have to deliver this machine and drive to another city tomorrow for my mom and it's driving me nuts.

All I can think of is that maybe my blank CDs are cd+r instead of cd-r but I would think if that were the case they wouldn't appear on the desktop as 'untitled cd' when I put them in, would it? (The discs have no packaging to confirm.)

Any help appreciated.

posted by dobbs to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Okay, I just plugged it into my iMac G5 and got the same error. Ugh.
posted by dobbs at 5:35 PM on October 1, 2005

You might want to try installing PatchBurn. Apple is notorious for crippling all third-party DVD/CD drives (besides its own SuperDrives) of burning capabilities. PatchBurn restores the ability to use these drives.
posted by melorama at 6:39 PM on October 1, 2005

Thanks melorama, but that didn't work. :(
posted by dobbs at 7:35 PM on October 1, 2005

One other thing comes to mind, since you mentioned you ripped the drive out of another machine and put it in an enclosure...is the drive set to Cable Select instead of of Master? I've noticed that Macs seem to be much fussier about drive jumper settings than PCs are. The only way I could get my third-party DVDR drive to work in my G4 as to set it to CS, even if it was the only device on the channel.

Just grasping at straws here...
posted by melorama at 7:52 PM on October 1, 2005

But the other drive I have is a straight usb external lacie burner. No switches or cables or anything.

The thing that's driving me nuts is that the system sees it for what it is and tries to burn and then just gives up.

I've now gone into Toast, which gives more info than the 'burn folder' option on OS X and it looks like it's burning the disc and crashing every time during the 'finishing' stage.

Oh, wait! It looks like it worked in Toast! It's a little complex for my mom but better than nothing, I guess. If anyone has any suggestions for making it work outside of Toast, please keep 'em coming.

Thanks melorama!
posted by dobbs at 8:02 PM on October 1, 2005

Second the advice tipping patchburn.
posted by Wolof at 9:29 PM on October 1, 2005

As long as you have the G5 there...could it be the batch of CDs? I often find that some brands...well...don't burn as well (CD or DVDs)

Threads I've come across along these lines:
Apple support suggestion - particularly asks for the console to be open

800020060 is an underrun error (similar perharps, once again underlying the idea that it'd be too easy to make error codes that make any sense

I did a bunch of searching....one thing for sure - the console.log will have more information
Utilities-> Console
posted by filmgeek at 4:35 AM on October 2, 2005

Thanks, all. I delivered the machine today. It works under Toast, which is good enough. Weird it doesn't work under other apps but I was sick of fighting it.
posted by dobbs at 5:02 PM on October 2, 2005