IBook CD-RW Drive Disk Question

Question

I recently bought a iBook 500MHz with the CD-RW drive and OSX 10.3.9. At first, I could load and read any CD and never had need to write to one - until now. All of a sudden, I was having trouble getting it to load and read disks. I followed all the suggestions from other threads for a fix and now it will recognize a CD-R or CD-RW disk, but it won't write to a 700 Mb CD-R disk.
I have tried 3 brands of CD's without success. The system recognizes the CD, but won't write to it with Apple's system or with Roxio Toast. By chance, I had a 650 Mb
CD-RW disk and both OSX and Toast are able to read and write to it??
Do you think it is possible that the drive is old enough (outdated firmware) that it can't write to a 700 Mb disk? I don't have a 650 Mb CD-R lying around to try it out, and nobody seems to sell them anymore. I do have several 650 Mb CD-RW disks available. Will OSX read a CD-RW as a bootable disk. Any thoughts?
iBook G3 500   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  
iBook G3 500   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Well, after messing around with this thing for upteen hours and getting no where, I took the iBook to an apple shop and they diagnosed a damaged CD-RW drive. It would still read disks, but not perform R/RW.
I was fortunate to pick up a used Toshiba SD-R2002 CD-RW/DVD-ROM Laptop Drive on eBay pretty cheap. I used the PBFixit guide to take the laptop apart and replace the CD drive. It took me about 3 hours to do the operation. Fortunately, the new (old) drive works fine - R/RW. Since the iBook didn't originally come with a DVD player, I had to manually install iDVD. DVD movies play very well on this 500 MHz system.
The only problem I had was that the iBook CD drive snap connectors on the face plate didn't match up with the new drive caddy. I had to break them off and reglue them in different positions to line up and also grind off some other protrusions. Once the glue dried, it snapped right into place and alignment (boy, was I lucky, and very happy that my 3 additional hours of work paid off). I really didn't want to spend an extra $30 or so for a new face plate but I figured I had nothing to loose here.
Bottom line...your CD-R/RW drive is probably also broken. Good luck.
iBook G3 500   Mac OS X (10.3.9)