Be careful of Internal 3rd Party D/L Burners
 

Just wanted to mention that you should be careful of installing certain 3rd party D/L burners in your mac laptop.I bought 2 for two G4 1.67ghz powerbooks and learned that they will NOT EJECT a disk if there is no system on the machine.

I wiped the drive of the machine clean with SuperScrubber, but couldn't eject the disk once I wanted to install OS X...No system, no eject.

Go with an external drive.I had to firewire install.

Maczniyu, I have never encountered any DVD burners that would not eject without a system. (Note that ALL optical drives are 'third party', as Apple does not manufacture optical drives. So specifying 'third party' drives is meaningless.)

To eject a disc in any optical drive when you have no operating system installed (either an optical drive that you added or one that shipped with a machine), simply hold down the left mouse button on powerup. (If you have a one-button mouse, then hold down the only mouse button on powerup.)

Trevor

Perhaps Your Right
 

Trevor,

Thanks for the reply. You're right about my misuse of the term 3rd party. What I meant was "after market" drives not installed at the time of purchase such as the original Matushita? drives.

I have encountered recurring problems on 2 G4 powerbooks when I installed D/L drives that were either SONY or Panasonic, I can't recall right now. I'lhave access to the machines and let you know.

I used SuperScrubber and tried to eject using the menu bar hold down, the eject button and by holding the mouse down on boot. I recall trying an open firmware eject as well, but the drive(s) remained lock and the disks would not eject.

Are you saying that a left mouse click would have worked where the other means failed? I'd never experienced a failure to eject a disk simply because of a lack of a system except for the two post purchase D/L burner drives which were highly rated. I'll get back to you with the D/L drive models. After the failure, I googled and learned that my experience was not unique; I wish I had known before, hence the reason for my post.

Curtis

I was assuming a computer with no bootable volumes, whether on CD/DVD or hard drive. I'm not sure what SuperScrubber is, but it sounds like that means you're running an application, i.e. at least some minimal operating system is running, whether that OS is OS X or something on the command line.

I'm saying that with a computer without an operating system, you're probably NOT going to get the F12 key on the keyboard held down for 3 seconds, or the Eject button on some keyboards to work to eject the optical drive. For that you need some other method.

An Open Firmware eject should work irregardless of the OS (it's in firmware, after all) and the trick of holding down the mouse button at startup should also work irregardless of the OS (also in firmware).

For what it's worth, Apple has used Sony optical drives fairly frequently in the past. And Panasonic is just the consumer electronics division of the giant Matsushita Corp (also sometimes known as Matshita). In other words, Matsushita = Panasonic = Matshita.

Trevor

Pioneer DVR k06 D/L Burner will not eject without an OS on HD
 

The Matshita drives do, indeed, work as expected in being able to eject a utility disk without a resident OS system on the hard drive. Super Scrubber is exactly what it sounds like. It is a 3rd party Utility disk capable of writing prearranged or customized patterns to wipe the laptop's drive prior to installation of a new system..and of course it has an OS resident when you boot it up.

I installed a Pioneer DVR-K06 in my G4 and it was (and still) is incapable of ejecting ANY 3rd party utility disk (TechTool Pro as well) once the resident OS system has been "wiped clean" even when Super Scrubber(sold by Apple at the time) initialized the drive when it was done.

I live in California and learned this the hard way. I traveled to the East Coast for business and my OS was crashing. Didn't have Disk Warrior with me so I used SuperScrubber first expecting I'd install the OS from a friend's disk the next day. (He works for Apple).

Nothing either one of us tried succeeded in ejecting that disk from the drive.
Mouse hold, firmware eject..you know all the usual stuff. I had to "firewire install" in NY.

When I got back to CA, I wanted to know if it was a defective utility disk (again,sold to me by Apple) so I ran the same test with Tech Tool Pro. Same result. This time, I even opened the unit to check the drive. It was blocked by a piece of hardware which prevented the disk from being ejected or removed by slipping in a piece of cardboard to wedge the disk out. That "lock mechanism" opened the moment a system was installed on the unit's hard drive.

Now Pioneer installed a lot of drives for stock Apple machines. A few of those early models A03, A04, A103 & A104 did require firmware updates but not for any "eject"problem.

The DVR K06 otherwise runs reliably...Some users seem to have eject issues with this drive but I'm not sure if they were the same problems I experienced. The unit was out of warranty by the time I experienced the problem, so no help from Pioneer. One agent said "it was a great drive" but they had received a few calls about an "eject issue" but wouldn't elaborate.
He couldn't suggest any fix.

I learned my lesson with this drive. No HD resident OS X = No Eject, no way even in open firmware. Thereafter, the only smart thing to do with this "after market" drive is to only use a bootable MAC OS X for erase purposes because then the machine automatically boots from the install disc.

I'm just saying.....