External DVD Drive Problems - Mountain Lion

hello,
I am having problems using external DVD Drives on my 2012 Mac Mini.
I have tried using 2 plug and play devices that are stared to work with Macs.
The drive powers up but it does not appear anywhere on the mac. essentially it wont mount.
the lasest drive I have tried is the Samsung SE - 208
Please Help!!!

Connect the drives, launch Disk Utility, and see if they show up. If so, pop in a disc and see if that solves your issue. AFAIK, they won't mount unless there/s a disc inside. If still no go,Zap the PRAM and Reset the SMC, then try again.

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Using snow leopard on external hard drive w/Mountain Lion OS Mac

I need to use Snow Leopard in order to use some expensive software that will not work in Lion or Mountain Lion. All of our computers have been upgraded to Mountain Lion, whcih doesn't support Rosetta. I was able to install Snow Leopard on an external hard drive and it boots up fine from another computer (that is not mine) that has Snow Leopard as its OS.
But when I boot up from my MacBook Pro (running Mountain Lion) and from my Macbook Air (also running Mountain Lion), I can't seem to do it. I hold the "option" key when starting and I get the option to start from the computer's HD or from the external firewire Snow Leopard drive. When I choose the Snow Leopard drive, it crashes and gives me that black screen with the kernel (?) message in several languages that I need to hold down the Power key to turn off the computer and reboot.
How can I get my MacBook Pro or my MacBook Air to boot up from the Snow Leopard external hard drive? (Once again, it DOES work with a Mac that has Snow Leopard as its OS).

Richard Signes2 wrote:
The question is: How do I start up my MacBook Air (or MacBook Pro) from an external FireWire Bootable hard drive with Snow Leopard on it? When I start up either one with the "option" key pressed, I get the option to start up with the external Snow Leopard hard drive, but when I select it, it crashes, as described above.
You can't if the Mac is a Late 2011 and later, perhaps if it's a Early 2011 (as some came with 10.6 and some with 10.7) and it should be possible for all Intel Mac's earlier than Early 2011.
Also, like what has occurred in the past, Apple does eventually issues a firmware update in later OS X versions so that earlier OS X versions, despite the Mac previously being able to boot from them, won't any longer. However far as I know Apple hasn't done this quite yet, but will one day.
Baring those issues, if you installed 10.6 on a external drive using a machine specific black/gray disk from another Mac, it has hardware drivers for that model/year of Mac only.
If you used the 10.6 white retail disks from Apple, it only has hardware drivers for all previous Intel Mac's that came originally with 10.6.2 or earlier from the factory. Mac's with 10.6.3 or later on the drive from the factory have different hardware drivers, thus not on the 10.6.3 white retail disk.
To find out what OS X version came on your machines, use the free MacTracker and use your model indentifier in the Apple menu More > Info (aka System Profiler)
So for those Mac's that originally came with 10.6.3 or later, machine specific disks must be gotten from Apple, or if your really talented, it's possible to create a univeral 10.6-10.6.8 install disk by combing the 10.6.3 image with the 10.6.8 combo update which will boot on any Intel Mac if the firmware permits and the hardware drivers are compable.
There is a method to bypass the firmware and install on Mac's that are Early 2011/Late 2011 via Target Disk Mode, or via taking the drive out of the machine as some Late 2011's use the same hardware drivers as the Early 2011 machines (only a processor bump basically)
How to revert your Mac to Snow Leopard
For the MacAir, you can install 10.6 via a USB thumb drive, of course provided it has the hardware drivers.
http://www.maciverse.com/install-os-x-snow-leopard-from-usb-flash-drive.html
So in your case you likely should be rather looking at running Snow Leopard in a virtual machine program in Mountain Lion, which MichealLax over at MacRumors has perfected a technique.
Windows in BootCamp or Virtual Machine?
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

How do I clone an external hard drive in Mountain Lion?

How do I use Disk Utitlity do clone a 1TB G-Drive to another G-drive same size. I tried using Disk Utility and Restore, but it failed. The new drive is brand new. Do I need to create an image, or if it is already formatted for Mac, is this unnecessary? thanks.

Drive Preparation of the New Drive
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
Clone using Restore Option of Disk Utility
1. Open Disk Utility in the Utilities folder.
2. Select the destination volume from the left side list.
3. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
4. Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination
entry field.
5. Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
6. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
Destination means the new drive. Source means the old drive.

Time machine back-up on external WD drive and Mountain Lion: Error:(22) setxattr message in my system log:

Nov 23 18:11:26 DBYAFs-iMac.local com.apple.backupd[2170]: Starting manual backup
Nov 23 18:11:26 DBYAFs-iMac.local com.apple.backupd[2170]: Backing up to: /Volumes/My Passport for Mac/Backups.backupdb
Nov 23 18:11:27 DBYAFs-iMac.local com.apple.backupd[2170]: Error: (22) setxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.HostUUID path:/Volumes/My Passport for Mac/Backups.backupdb/DBYAF‚Äôs iMac size:37
Nov 23 18:11:37 DBYAFs-iMac.local com.apple.backupd[2170]: Backup failed with error: 2
Can someone help please?
Thank you
DBAYF

Usually that error indicates a drive malfunction; specifically, the drive is spinning down and not responding to bus signals. Some "Eco" or "green" drives are known for this behavior. The following steps may help:
Select  ▹ System Preferences ▹ Energy Saver ▹ Power Adapter and uncheck the box labeled Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible, if it's checked.
If the drive is connected to a hub, connect it to a built-in port on the computer.
If a firmware update is available for the drive, apply it.
Contact the drive manufacturer to see whether there's a firmware setting you can change.
If you installed vendor software for the drive, uninstall it.
If none of the above steps resolves the issue, try another drive.

If I replace my old iMac with a new one can I burn DVDs on an external drive using Mountain Lion or Toast?

My 2006 iMac is getting a bit long in the tooth and I was thinking of replacing it with a new one. However, Mac have not included an optical drive and I back up my photographs on DVD as well as external hard drives. I also supply DVDs of my work to friends etc.
Will I be able to burn to an external drive using Mountain Lion or other software such as Toast? Does the burn option still exist on the new machines?

Hello,
You shouldn't have any problem, if you do just try Burn...
http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html

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 format an external drive with mountain lion?

How do I format an external drive with mountain lion?

Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
select the external drive in the left pane
partition and format in the right pane

Problem booting from external DVD drive on Lenovo S10e

Hi,
I recently purchased a new Lenovo S10e ideapad, a few weeks prior to that I purchased an external DVD rewriter drive manufactured by LG, the drive works perfectly on every computer I try with the exception of the Lenovo ideapad S10e.
The thing is that the drive is being recognized and installed by the Windows XP Home Edition the S10e came with but when I try to boot a bootable CD using then drive on the S10e ideapad I almost alwasy fail to do so.
I set the S10e BIOS to have the USB CDROM as first boot device, in addition I used the F12 key to use the boot menu to choose the boot device, in 9 out 0f 10 atempts my external drive will not show in the boot menu and when choosing the enter setup option I see that the BIOS do not list it as the USB CDROM, instead it says "USB CDROM:" rather than have the drive name after it.
In the 1 time out of 10 it does work the BIOS seem to be identifying the drive and it shows in the boot menu, however I cannot work with it for a more than 1 minute without it stopped being recognized again.
The problem seems very strange to me as the drive works under the windows operating system and do not have any problem whatsoever on other computers, I have tested the external drive on my PC, another Mini Laptop from LG and a GIGABYTE Laptop (Normal one), all of which had no problems recognizing the external drive and booting from it.
I will really appreciate if I can get some help with the problem.
Thanks.

I've had a similar issue with X61 and the external DVD drive from Lenovo.
In my case, it was the power issue. On the back of the drive, there is a small table says that the drive needs a 3.0A 5V power input. One USB 2.0 port can only provide 0.5A. I don't know if the drive has any special, low power mode, but I suspect that even if it has, 0.5A is still not enough to fully power it. I've checked the current with the multimeter, and at peak times, the drive draws 550mA. Even then, it makes a stuttering sound for a few seconds, before finally spinning the DVD disk. I've also noticed that the DVD works most of the times when it's connected to the left USB port. That may be because of how the laptop's internal power circuicity is laid out (+separate USB host controller for each 'side' of the laptop). Another thing that seems to help is to disable all 5V driven devices that the laptop uses: the wifi card, bluetooth, any additional devices connected to the USB bus / to the ethernet port / SD card port (I'm not actually sure which of the devices are 5V and which are 3.3V, but the best option is to disable all of them), maybe even remove the battery (if it's charging). Finally, the DVD drive works better if the laptop was turned on and runnig for some time, rather than it being turned on "a minute before". Also, in the BIOS, there is a setting that changes the speed of the DVD drive, but switching it to "low" didn't seem to affect the external drive (at least not before Windows boots up).

Did Apple Break HD-DVD Playback with Mountain Lion using Apple DVD Player?

First of all, kindly spare me the commentary about Blu-Ray beating HD-DVD. Agreed and not the question. I have perfectly good reasons for using HD-DVD and it works very well for my purposes.
I authored an HD-DVD in DVD Studio Pro 4.2.2. as I have done many times before on Snow Leopard, but this time on Mountain Lion. When I try to play the HD-DVD, either from the physical disk from a disk image, the menu appears, but when the play button is pressed, the menu stays on screen, but the player shows the timecode of the movie playing, but with no sound or picture.
Thinking that perhaps the menu got corrupted, I put the same HD-DVD into a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard, and it played perfectly! Conclusion: Not a DVD Studio Pro problem.
Thinking that it might be DVD Player, I copied DVD Player 5.4 from the Snow Leopard MacBook Pro to the Mountain Lion MacBook Pro (which was running DVD Player 5.6), and the HD-DVD still had the same issue on the Mountain Lion MacBook Pro, under either of the DVD Player versions. Conclusion: Not a DVD Player issue.
The HD-DVD does mount and initialize, so it's not a hardware issue with the optical drive.
Conclusion: It would appear to me that it's an OS issue with Mountain Lion breaking (either intentionally or unintentionally), HD-DVD playback. Anyone know anything more about this issue? Anyone else saddened to see Apple turn into Microsoft circa 2005, and the MacOS turn into Vista? I haven't seen much of anything about it in the forums, which is why I'm posting it here.
Thanks Apple. I just spent the better part of 3 days transcoding and authoring this HD-DVD, only to have you screw it up for me 2 days before my film festival (the perfectly good reason for using HD-DVD). Kindly spare me the, "Why don't you encode a ProRes blah blah blah quicktime movie." Heard it all before.
I knew I would regret upgrading to Mountain Lion, and I do more and more each and every day as I continually find more things that it broke. Yet another reason to add to my list for downgrading to Snow Leopard. I'm up to about 30 of them. Or to abandon Final Cut for Adobe products.
Thanks and sorry for the rant, but I'm justifiably frustrated.

Update: The Apple Store in Nashua, New Hampshire replicated the issue on their own hardware, so yes, Apple did break HD-DVD playback with Mountain Lion (it does still work in Lion, they discovered). The Apple Store reported the issue to engineering, but the more people that report the issue, the more likely Apple will do something about it. Thanks Apple.

Internal DVD drive is shot. Can I install SL from an external DVD drive?

Hi folks, a quick (well actually a few) questions.
I've had my imac since early '06. It's currently running Tiger, and I'd like to install Snow Leopard. The problem is that the internal DVD drive is shot. It's been occasionally refusing to accept DVDs for a while now, and now it has a DVD stuck in it (not mounted), which I can't get out via terminal, rebooting, or jiggling it (technical term I know).
Now, I'm going to assume that getting apple to replace the DVD drive will be more expensive than just grabbing an external drive, especially as I'll most probably only use it once. The question is, if I grab a cheap external DVD drive, will I be able to install Snow Leopard with it? Or will Tiger not recognise it as a boot drive?
Many thanks,
Chris
p.s. Also, I'm using a cheapo windows style keyboard (will be replacing asap), and I'm wondering if this is why I can't see bootable drives when holing option on startup?

Yes, you can install from an external drive, although I wouldn’t go for a cheap one. There are good, relatively inexpensive, drives out there. And you are going to need that option key to select the install disk as your startup. I believe there is a corresponding key on a PC keyboard, but I don’t know what it is (maybe Alt?). I’m sure someone can jump in here and tell us.

Apple dvd player / external dvd drive issue

i recently bought a LaCie d2 external dvd drive, since my desktop g4 only has an internal cdr drive. I am running osx 10.4.3, which i installed through this dvd drive. yet now, when i put a DVD movie into the drive and try to open Apple DVD Player, it says
"There was an initialization error. A valid DVD drive could not be found. [-70012]"
i know this is a third party drive, but can anyone help me out? pleeeease?

This is to be expected. DVD Player will only work
with an external DVD drive if the Mac has an internal
DVD drive.
However you may overcome this limitation using PlayerPatc
h.
I had the same problem as above (error code [-70012])... I downloaded this patch for my LG external DVD/RW Model GSA-2166D and it worked perfectly... can now play DVDs...
It's people like you who make being part of the mac community a joy!
Now I just need to find a patch to get the Light Scribe to work...
Thanks!
A1005 Mac OS X (10.3.9) M8758LL/A

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!

I have a 15" MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (Early 2008) running OSX Lion 10.7.5. I want to erase the Hard Drive, install Mountain Lion, and manually restore select applications and files. Is there a known procedure to do this? Any tips or feedback?

I have a 15" MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (Early 2008) running OSX Lion 10.7.5.
I want to erase the Hard Drive, install Mountain Lion, and manually restore select applications and files.
Is there a known procedure to do this? Any tips or feedback?

1. Make a backup, open App Store and purchase Mountain Lion. When its download finishes, close the installer and open Lion Diskmaker to create a bootable USB drive with Mountain Lion.
2. Press Option key while your Mac is starting, select the external drive and open Disk Utility.
3. Select Macintosh HD in the sidebar and erase the drive.
4. Close the window and install Mountain Lion

Is it possible to install Tiger using an external DVD drive?

I have one the of the first iMacs and at the time I thought I didn't need a DVD Player. However, now I was thinking of buying an external DVD player/burner. Is it possible to upgrade to Tiger using the external DVD drive since I don't have an internal one?

Hi Celticart,
Welcome to the discussions.
I have an old AGP PowerMac G4 to which I have hooked an external Firewire DVD Drive. I have installed Tiger without any problems, using this drive. I see no reason why it couldn't be done on an iMac as well, (provided it has Firewire).
I don't think you could get it to work using an external drive hooked up via USB.
Cheers!
Karl

My optical drive went out. what external dvd drive will work?

My optical drive is going out. I went to Apple and they suggested I buy an external dvd drive instead of paying $150+ to replace the drive on my MacBook Pro. I bought the Samsung Ultra Portable Slim External DVD drive and it took about 15+minutes for my Mac to even acknowledge it. Then it read the dvd and then my Mac told me it was consuming too much power through the USB and disconnected it. And I could not get it to work after that. I called Apple Support to find out what drives will work and they told me their USB Superdrive. I told them I read it won't work with Mac's that already have an optical drive installed, they looked it up and told me I'm correct. When I asked them what other drives they suggest, they told me they had no idea and I should google it.
Super frustrated.

Virtually ant external drive should work with your MBP. I would suggest one with external power so that you do not run into the same problem.
You might try a USB 'Y' connector with the one that you have purchased. That may allow sufficient power for it to operate. This is an example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998124&nm_mc=KNC-Google Adwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-pla-_-SSD%2f+HDD+Accessory-_-N82E16817998124& gclid=CPSg2Y7EgrcCFccx4AodvycAyg
Ciao.

External DVD Drive Problems - Mountain Lion

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