Combo drive won't play CD's

after recently (seemingly) ironing out the bugs in iTunes 7.0.1, my combo drive won't play commercial CD's. MP3 CD's play in iTunes just fine and it will burn CD's. but both the finder (copying) and iTunes freeze when i try to play commercial CD's. when trying to copy aiff files to harddrive as a workaround, i get the following error message:
"some data on (in the file) is unreadable or unwritable. error (-34)"
i suspect the problem is with the drive itself as an external CD-DVD firewire writer has no problem and works with iTunes just fine.
is the combo drive dying? is there a software patch somewhere? is the problem caused by iTunes? quicktime?
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

As in the posting of Oct 3 from regmetc, following
the install of iTunes 7.0.2 and QT 7.1.3, my combo
drive won't play most commercial CD's. Most curious
is that I have so far found ONE commercial CD in my
library that plays just fine, but haven't had the
time to check all of the 200+ cds I own. It will burn
CD's and read DVDs. but iTunes will freeze when I try
to play commercial a CD.
An external CD firewire writer has no problem and
works with iTunes just fine.
Booting from an external backup drive with an earlier
cloned OSX 10.4.6 and iTunes 6.0.2 did not cure the
problem.
Hardware test shows no hardware problems.
as a followup ... did extensive hardware testing and software re-loading and found that there was nothing wrong with the hardware ... everything worked just fine if I returned to OS 10.3.9 or earlier and itunes 6 or earlier. I found I could run OS 10.4.0 through 10.4.8 and have the cd drive work fine if I stayed at itunes 4, but once I changed up to 6 or 7 I lost the drives ability to read music cds. Data cds are not affected and DVDs play just fine.
I am now assuming that there is some code change whereas OS 10.4 and itunes 6 or 7 doesn't provide the proper driver for the cd combo drive. I have a cd rom drive in another laptop that is not affected and any external cd drive seems to be fine. It would be curious to know if a different enternal drive like a superdrive would work.

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[email protected]

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You have found the G3 Dual USB iBook Forum, but I can help you out a bit. The warranty on the iBook gives you free phone support for any and all issues for 90 days. Use it. For full information on the warranty in plain language, check out Rachel's helpful FAQ Is phone support and warranty service free?
I recommend that your fiancée buy AppleCare. If you have any problems whatsoever with a new iBook within the first year of its eligibility, it is foolhardy to not purchase AppleCare if it is available where you live.
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Combo drive won't play CD's

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