Any ideas for external DVD drive in UK

I think it has to be Firewire to use it to upgrade the OS from and I want it to be cheap and small. I have only found Freecom so far, which I know nothing about.
Everyone on here seems to recommend OWC but I can't find a distributor in the UK.
thanks

I took the TDK 840G out of my PC, put it in an external USB enclosure, and it works fine with my MacBook Pro.

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Unable to alternate internal DVD RW drive for external DVD driv

Hi,
Please call me Yogie.
I have a G4 computer issue.
I have a Mac computer (G4-500mhz dual) with a Pioneer super drive. It has failed, to the point where it won't read dvd's. I've purchased an external dvd-cd burner (lacie) and when I want to record photos from Idvd, the Pioneer super drive tray will open for dvd insertion, but doesn't recognize the dvd. I need to override the Pioneer superdrive, so I can use the Lacie dvd rw drive. How can I do that ?
Thanks

Hi Yogie:
Welcome to discussions!
How is that LaCie drive formatted? You must use HFS+ to store iMovie files, not FAT32(DOS) or Unix.
Connect the external drive and then launch Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities). You'll see your external drive in Disk Utility's side bar; select it and then click the Erase tab at the top. From the Volume Format menu select which type of formatting you want (most likely Mac OS Extended-Journaled) and then click the oval Erase button at the lower right.
Sue

All users GONE except for "Other"...and CANNOT boot from External DVD drive

I booted the iMac (Intel...the last one with the White Bezel) tonight, and all of my users were GONE except for "Other." The internal Superdrive has had a disc jammed in it for months, so instead I have an OWC external USB/FW400/FW800 DVD drive. Snow Leaopard.
I need to boot from the SL install disc, but that must go into the external drive...which, as it's been since I upgraded to SL, the Mac sometimes sees and sometimes doesn't. Right now it can't see it. Which leaves me a big pile of crap, doesn't it?
So, what to do? I can't boot the internal drive because it's jammed with a DVD (or I spend $300 to replace what should be a $20 optical drive in it), I can't boot the external DVD drive because the iMac w/Snow Lepeord can't see it, and, meanwhile, all of my photos, etc., are on my Time Machine backup drive...which, as long as I can't do any of the above, just sits there...useless.
Can you tell I'm a bit frustrated with this?
I've reset the PRAM. I've rebooted. I've held down all sorts of combinations of keys. I've tried every single interface type on the external drive and the same thing - the drive can't be seen by the computer.
Has the internal hard drive failed? Nope. I'm tying this using the Firefox browser that's running on my Windows XP installation via Boot Camp on the internal hard drive.

Thanks, but no luck so far.
I have an old iMac G3 downstairs, and I connected it to the machine via Firewire. I could see the disk on the 24" iMac, its folders, etc. I wanted to see if I could install OS X via Target Disk Mode from the old machine to the new one, but it's a PowerPC machine and you can't do that. Maybe you can't do that from ANY iMac...I'm not that experienced.
Now the iMac isn't booting at all to Windows via Boot Camp - it's been booting for 45 minutes now with the "WinXP" logo, but nothing. I'm about to throw it in the car and haul it over to my parents, who have both a Powerbook and a 27" iMac. Maybe it'll work there. Who knows.
Other ideas...replace the internal hard drive (cheap)...if that doesn't work, I'll just sell the thing. I'm not going to sink $300 into the thing when I can get a new machine for around $600-$700. I may go to a Windows7 machine on the desktop and a Powerbook...maybe even an iPad.
I really want to love this iMac. It's my first (well, I did have the G3, but that was just to play with) Mac. It's given me a ton of problems since I bought it new. It's always been a "stock" machine - nothing weird done to it. I was hit with an iMovie update once, and that broke iMovie. Even the new iLife 2009 didn't fix it. Then, the internal optical disk drive failed. I couldn't believe that Apple used a proprietary optical drive rather than a stock Pioneer model. Price for the drive alone? $200.
I installed Snow Leopard 2 months ago, and that completely broke my ability to use external optical drives. Sometimes they work...most times they don't. This is an ongoing problem that many people are having (check the forums)...but no fix. Where does that leave me? With a useless computer.
So, I've boiled it down to this: I love the Mac software. I hate the hardware. Sure, it's pretty, but if something goes wrong, get ready to pay. I hate that Apple knows about problems, yet does nothing to address them, like the problem with external optical drives and Snow Leopard.
I bought the Mac because I was sick of Microsoft not being able to simply produce an OS full of security holes. Often times I read people bashing supposed "driver ****" with Windows, but look at what users of Windows machine are demanding of Microsoft - "please make my software compatible with the trillions of combinations of hardware that can run the os...all the way back to stuff that was created in the mid 1990s." Meanwhile, from my experience, Apple can't get their software to work with their own proprietary, supposedly vertically-controlled hardware.
Windows7 is a not bad OS. It's got it's faults, of course. But, if my optical drive failed in a Windows box, I'd have it replaced in 10 minutes...with a bluray drive...that can write...for under $100.
I use my computer for pictures, etc. In fact, we were ready to send off to iPhoto for our yearly photo books. That's not going to happen, as the photos are forever trapped on my Time Machine backup drive (lesson learned: dump photos to a generic format...fat32 works...just in case you decide to switch from Mac to Win7). iLife is great. MS Office is great, too, on the Mac. I love the little things the Mac does right.
After years of screwing around with my Windows box, I wanted a computer that acted like a consumer electronic device. That's not what I've gotten.
Ugh, so now do I buy a Mac Mini for $700, a new iMac for $1,400, or a Macbook Pro and a mac mini?
...or...do I continue to work within this silly Ubuntu Linux world?
Whatever the answer, I wish I didn't have to ask the question now.

Backing Up To An External DVD Drive. Any Suggestions?

I have a question please? How do I change settings in iTunes to backup to an external "DVD" drive instead of an internal "Cd" drive? Everytime I try to back things up in iTunes, the only option I see is to backup to Cd. I rarely backup anything to Cd, I use my external DVD burner which in my opinion works so much better, not to mention, would naturally use far less discs. I am clueless where I can change the settings for iTunes to recognize that I don't want to use Cds or my internal Cd burner, but my external DVD burner. I've posted this message on another board about 3 days ago, and haven't seen a response as of yet. Maybe I had asked on the wrong board? If so, I apologize. I truly hope one of you knowledgable souls out there can lend a hand to a new iPod owner.
((Thanks)) ever-so-much for any help/tips anyone can send my way.
Compaq Presario Windows XP

You should be able to dump the contents of the external disk as Data with many backup software out there. I use Sonic DigitalMedia. If the media is in your itunes library you can to burn it to DVD as data only.
go to itunes -->advanced--burning--set as data DVD.
This I don't think would degrade the quality of the sound as you are putting the info as data with original format.

Qill my mac accept any IDE/ATAPI interface DVD writer?

Hello,
I'm currently seeking to upgrade my Quicksilver's 1x Superdrive to a newer, faster DVD writer. I was looking at a Lightscribe 20x DVD writer to transform the painfully slow burning sessions into quicker put-on-DVD archival making.
+(RAW files take a lot of place on a HDD and slow burning sessions are now the weakest link in my workflow — a new DVD burner is a must until I change my whole computer somewhere in the following year...)+
Now since most online retailers provide only minimum information about their products, you generally know which versions of Windows will support the drive, but when it comes to Mac OS X... usually, there's nothing to confirm that the drive will work on a Mac or not!
Now the question is: will any IDE/ATAPI interface DVD burner fit in my G4 Quicksilver 2002 dual 1.0 GHz or do I need to look for a drive that specifically supports OS X? (Like an external USB / Firewire drive, for instance).
Any feedback on that would be much appreciated.
Thanks.

There is a database that holds users' experiences installing third-party drives in various Macs. If you have a drive or two in mind, you can enter the specific drive and read the reports:
http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/search.drivedb.lasso

Macbook Pro not able to burn from External DVD drive

Hi there,
I just bought a Samsung SE-208DB external drive for my 2011 Macbook Pro 8,1 13inch and at first the drive was detected by my Macbook Pro and I was able ot burn a disk but now when I plug in the device, it powers on for a bit then powers off to were I can't eject the disk anymore.Then sometimes it works just fine. I am using an external USB hub with AC plug power so I am confident power to the USb isn't an issue. I just wanted to know are Macbook Pro known to have issues with external drives?
And for those wondering why I don't just use the internal DVD on my Macbook Pro, I replaced it with an SSD for dedicated Windows 7 operating system.
Any ideas on how to approached this problem? Should I just get another brand of external DVD drive. I know I can't get Apples as for some strange reason, Apple makes those only compatible with Macs that didn't come with DVD drives like the Macbook Air.
Thanks

Ok I solved it.
The problem is that the drive uses too much power from the usb port.
You can use one of those cables with on one end two usb plugs and on the other end a mini usb. Connect the coresponding usb for power to an iphone charger or any 5v/1amp charger.
Or you can do what I did. I used a usb hub. In one usb port I connected my iphone charger and the drive to another usb port on the hub.
I have just burned my first succesful disc.
Regards

External DVD drive not working with Lombard G3 333

I have an external DVD drive that worked when I had 10.4, but had to reformat HD and now only have 10.3.9, and now the DVD drive does not work with DVDs, it will work with CDs and CDR media, but not with DVD media. My Lombard did not come with DVD originally and I am using a PC Card (Macintosh PowerBook DVD-Video PC Card For PowerBook G3 Series) and it worked before with 10.4, but not with 10.3, any ideas? Also have tried with 9.x, no go either. Any help would be appreciated.
Also, would it be difficult to add a DVD logic board to my Lombard?
Joey

xamdu,
I am reading and replying to this post after first replying to your other post, so a few of my previous comments are redundant.
Regarding the FireWire(?) USB 2.0(?) DVD drive: It is possible Tiger supported your DVD drive but Panther does not. I would give PatchBurn for Panther a try:
http://patchburn.de/download.html
If the above is unsuccessful, take a look at this workaround:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040330171655882
You can swap logic boards but it does require a lot of disassembly.
Since no version of OSX supports Apple DVD Player, I am assuming you have a third-party player like VLC installed to watch movies. If this is the case, the DVD Decoder PC card is not necessary. If booted to 9.x, you of course will need the decoder PC card but I did not know 9.x's Apple DVD Player supported external drives.

Starting up an emac using an external dvd drive?

My emac has frozen. I was installing the software update to system 10.4.6 when the machine crashed (not enough HD space? don't know.)
Now, it won't get past the Starting Mac OS X screen.
I figure I need to do a clean install or something drastic, just to rebuilt the system software. I think that will work, but I have a problem:
The 10.4 disks I bought only came in DVDs. My emac only has a CD drive, so I installed the software using an external DVD burner.
I have tried to restart holding down the C key, but it's not starting off the external drive.
I have no idea where the ancient OSX disks (CDs) are that came with the computer, and don't know if it's a good idea to go backwards anyhow.
I know the actual hard drive on the emac is functional, because I was able to make it a target disk to back up the files today.
Any clue how to start up using the external DVD drive and the 10.4 DVD?

Edward Rosenstein,
Welcome to the Apple Discussions!
Had you used patchburn on the external DVD drive?
Does the drive appear as an option using the option key to bring up Startup Manager?
You mention backing up the eMac's hard drive in Firewire Target Disk Mode. The host computer you used for that should show you how much free space there is on the eMac hard drive; you'll need at least 5 to 8 GB free.
If the host computer you used for the Firewire Target Disk Mode backup has a DVD drive, you can use that to install 10.4 onto the eMac while the eMac is connected in target disk mode. If the host computer doesn't have a DVD drive, try moving the external DVD drive to the host, run Patchburn if it's not recognized, and you should be able to install onto the eMac that way.

Cant eject disk from external DVD drive

I inserted an dvd into my external DVD drive for my new mac book pro and it will not eject.
I believe the disk is defective. It does show up in finder but does not read any files on it.
Tried, eject key from keyboard, ejecting from finder, rebooting, Nothing seems to work.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Thank you.

When all else fails try Tech Support.
The solution: reboot and while starting up, hold the left mouse button down (or equivalent) until it ejects.

Satellite A660 - Not finding external DVD drive

Hey guys. Newbie posting out of total desperation and needing help! I have posted in other forums with no luck. I bought a Samsung SH-D162D DVD Drive in a USB enclosure to connect to my Satellite A660 via USB.
I cannot get Windows 7 to find it! When I plug in the USB cable the balloon comes up to say it has been installed (sometimes), I can see it on for about 1 or 2 minutes then it drops off. It isnt listed in my hardware or anything. Its not found in Disk Management or My Devices so it isnt a case of changing the drive letter - I cant find the drive to change it. I have also tried to find the upper and lower settings in regedit. Couldnt find them so couldnt delete them as advised in other posts of this nature.
It is set to master, the IDE connector and power connectors are fine. Its gotta be a Windows 7 problem cause it does show up very breifly. In the minute or 2 its there I cant do anything with it. It just hangs although it will open and close. Ive googled it and cant find anything. Mainly registry issues but they didnt help.
Ive also connected it up to another laptop with XP and had no problems so I know the DVD Rom works fine and all the cables are ok. Ive tried in all 4 USB ports on my laptop and also turned off all energy settings. All with no luck. And I also have every Windows 7 update.
Heres exactly what happens from power off on the enclosure.
1 - I plug in the USB lead then turn on power to the enclosure.
2 - I quickly go to Start, and I can see the DVD Rom drive E next to my laptops dvd rom.
3 - The green bar at the top starts filling up from left to right and gets about half way then suddenly the DVD Rom icon disappears and so does the green bar.
4 - It then flashes up under the laptops DVD Rom icon with a Local Disk drive E but only for a split second.
5 - Sometimes a balloon comes up saying installing device, then device successfully installed...but not every time.
And thats it. I'm at a total loss and cant work it out, so any help is really appreciated!

Hi Smee,
So if you have already connected the external drive to another computer and this worked properly, it seems to be a driver or compatibility issue between your external DVD drive and and your Satellite A660
It will be connected to USB port so have you tried to remove all USB ports from device manager? After this you should restart your computer and the USB ports will be recognized from device manager automatically. Furthermore I would also try updating the chipset driver. Newest version you can download on official Toshiba website:
http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.com > Support & Downloads > Download Drivers
Have you also tested other devices on your A660 if they work properly?

Boot Windows AND FreeBSD from my MacBook Pro 8,3 using an external DVD drive. I'm considering to remove my DVD-ROM and replace it with an SSD drive. That doesn't seem to work. Why not?

As the title says, I'm attempting to boot off my favorite operating systems, Mac OS X, Windows 7 and FreeBSD from an external DVD drive. However, for some odd reasons, booting the Windows DVD and FreeBSD 9.1 install DVD from the external drive does not seem to work. I was able to create a bootable USB with the Windows installer, but whenever I attempt to do the same with FreeBSD, I only get an error message that says "No bootable device -- press any key to restart." Is this a limitation that Apple deliborately created? If so, why won't Apple let its customers do whatever they please with their computers, considering that customers who want to change the hardware and/or operating systems knows what he is doing, without having to worry about some silly Apple limitations?
If I sound rude, I apologize for that, as no impoliteness is intended from my side.
In advance, thanks. Have a wonderful day, everyone.

That is only partially correct at best.
When you are booting off Windows or any other operating systems that usually don't support EFI (including Windows), your Mac uses something called CSM-BIOS. And as long as that CSM-BIOS implementation on EFI-based Mac do not support booting off from USB (note that Mac OS X Installer works fine when booting from USB), not even a USB Apple SuperDrive which once was an internal drive, there mot definately is something for Apple to fix.
When attempting to install Windows via BootCamp, a somewhat hybrid GTP/MBR table is created. When you boot off the installer disc of the OS you intend to install (i.e. Windows 7, FreeBSD, etc), your Mac might not support the EFI boot option (at least my 2011 17-inch MacBook Pro doesn't support that), so the only way of booting that second OS installer is via the regular BIOS, which Apple's EFI based systems implement as CSM-BIOS.

Installing Windows XP on Lion using external DVD drive

Hi, this is my first time posting on a forum at all, so just keep that in mind when dealing with me.
I have recently attempted to install Windows XP by partitioning my drive using the disk utility (seeing as Bootcamp no longer supports Windows XP installations). The problems start when I boot from the installation disk; an error "no bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key" occurs. I am inclined to believe that this is due to me using an external DVD drive when doing all of this. I am using an external DVD drive because my internal DVD drive has been spoilt and is no longer useable.
Does anyone have a solution for me? It seems that it is not possible to install windows using an external DVD drive.

I am doing this after doing a full wipe of my hard drive and reinstalling lion.
Previously, I had lion, and made a partition using disk utility and booted from the disk (this time it was from my Mac's SuperDrive which was functioning perfectly at this point in time) and finished the installation completely fine. I then used the drivers that were in my Snow Leopard DVD (I have a Snow Leopard DVD from a previous Mac I purchased).
The only difference between then and now is that I am using an external DVD drive.

How do I run system recovery dvd from an external dvd drive?

I am having trouble trying to restore my DV 6000 (dv6915nr) from an external dvd drive. I am aware that this laptop has had several hardware issues, including the loss of use of the internal dvd drive and have tried all the fixes that I could find,including changing filter settings in the registry, changinging the boot order in the bios and even removing the intenal drive. Since none of these fixes worked, I removed the hard drive and installed window 7 Prodessional in a desktop computer. After reinstalling drive in laptop, I installed all the Vista drivers from HP. Computer works fine except for sound card and Nic that failed and have been replaced by USB devices. Simce I am not 100% sure the hardware failures are motherboard failures and not software, I would really like to run my System Restore DVDs that I purchased from HP. And that's where I need help.
I am A Plus and Network Plus certified, so I am pretty sure that I have tried all the obvious soutions. Evedrything turned on, checked the cables, accessed dvd in wimdows and even ran restore disk in a desktop machine to the point that it told me I was trying to restore the wong computer. I downloaded a program called Win To Flash that allows you to copy a setup disk to an external hard drive, but that didn't work. HP restore disk does not have Setup file on it, so it wouldn't copy to drive. Tried just copying the disk to external and that didn't work either. Also tried switching drive letters D and E without any success.
Bios choices are:
USb floppy
ATAPI cd/dvd rom drive
USB diskette on key
Notebook Hard drive
Network Adapter
Original restore partition is long gone.
I would rather restore it with an external Hard drive, not an USB memory stick. I think both would work the same. I do have an USB floppy drive, if there is some way of starting installation from floppies.
Like I said, I really like the computer, even with all its faults, but I would like to restore it to its original Operating System.

Some progress, I got it to try to boot from an external hard drive. Downloaded a program called WINToboot. tried to run it, got as far as formatting my hard drive and might have loaded some kind of boot program. Would not copy my restore disks because they did not have set up program. Copied both restore disks to hard drive and tried to boot laptop. F0 produced choose external hard drive choice. Got "no OS found" error. only choice ctl alt del. I think I am headed in right direction. Just need to know what to load on external hard drive.

I converted from a PC to a Mac Mini. I have my PC documents backed up on a DVD disk. I have an external DVD drive connected to the Mac Mini. I want to open them up and save them to the Mac, BUT....when I put the DVD disk in the Mac is NOT reading it!

I converted from a PC to a Mac Mini. I have my PC documents backed up on a DVD disk. I have an external DVD drive connected to the Mac Mini. I want to open these documents up from the DVD storage and save them to the Mac, BUT....when I put the DVD disk in the Mac is NOT reading it!

Hi Joe,
Thanks for your quick response. I should add....it worked before. When I previously inserted the two DVDs into this remote drive, and I went into finder, I could click on the "remote device" line and see all my saved documents (excel, word, etc) on the DVD and open them on the Mac. Now I cannot see them, when I try to open them on the Mac, nothing happens, nothing is displayed. I just re-tested the remote DVD drive with a CD and, no problem, it opened up the CD via iTunes and I cold play the CD. SO......I know the remote DVD drive (it's an LG by the way) is fine, it's something to do with some settings on my mini mac,especially where I could open it previously. I do not remember changing any settings since then.
When I go into system preferences and click on CD/DVD it gives me options of how to open up a music CD (default is iTunes), a DVD (default is iMovie), etc. The problem is my DVD is all miscellaneious files/documents. I just want to be able to see them in the finder. I also tried to open them via microsoft word, from the remote disk and again, it could not open the drive, even though some of the documents were microsoft word documents. Again, I was able to open them previously and the DVD is not corrupted in any way.
Any additional advice?
Thank you!

Satellite A200 - Need driver for CD/DVD drive

Hey folks.
Recently installed WXP Pro on my A200 PSAEC laptop, so I'm now dual booting XP and Vista on my laptop.
Problem is, I've got all the drivers working on XP and everything's running perfect, but when I tried to burn a DVD, Nero says the recorder can't burn DVDs. In "My Computer" the drive shows as a DVD-RW drive, but when I insert a blank DVD, it says CD Drive. The drive shows up as "TCSDcor' CD/DVDW TC-L6#2D" in device manager. I've searched around for a driver, but can't find an exact match for that drive and there's no optical drive drivers on this Toshiba site driver section. The only thing I've found is an executable file for upgrading the firmware, but it throws an error saying it's the wrong drive.
Anyone got any ideas?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi
Toshiba European driver page provides three different firmware updates for Satellite A200 PSAEC series:
TO02 for CD/DVD drive TS-L632
TO02 - for CD/DVD drive TS-L632P
(This firmware solves some problems of the optical disc drive.)
TO03 - for CD/DVD drive TS-L632H
(This firmware solves some problems of the optical disc drive.)
Im not quite sure what TO0$ means but I think the sign $ is only a free variable parameter (place marker).
If you want to check your current firmware then you could check it using the Nero Info Tool
http://www.nero.com/enu/support-nero8-tools-utilities.html

Any ideas for external DVD drive in UK

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