Mac mini and External Optical drives

hi all,
just wondering if i'll be able to use external optical drives with my mac mini which doesn't have a DVD writer, it detects and mounts in OSX, but can't playback a dvd or burn, do i have to use any third party software like roxio?
any help would be much appreciated.

You omit specifics but this might help, especially if you already have an external hd on firewire and plan to add an ext optical drive to the firewire chain. Burn Disk created one perfect DVD (consisting of backup files) but then became flaky, dying during burns. Patchburn (www.patchburn.de) did not help this problem but it did change system profile of the new optical drive from: 'unsupported' to 'vendor authorized' which may have helped generally. With Panther it will be required!
I did lots of searching on Web, Groups & Apple Discussions but could not find anything on "Error: 0x80020020: BE, sense error, etc".
I discovered the solution to this problem: I put the DVD external drive between the Mac Mini & the external harddrive (instead of at the end) and now BurnDisk works 100%. "Sense Errors" were common back when I was using SCSI drives and usually pointed to cable length issues. This was the simplest alteration I could make to my PPC G4 Mac Mini setup. I am using the 3 ft shielded cables that came with both of my external enclosures so it is reasurring that these did not have to be modified.
Now Burn Disc creates solid DVDs of backup folders, no more coasters or long pauses in the burning process, followed by the inevitable error code.
Using Pioneer DVR-112D drive in a generic ext enclosure. The drive is current production so I have not modified the firmware. Using Memorex DVD-R from WalMart.
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hi everyone,
My 2 year old son watches movies on my macbook pro. He stuck something in the optical drive making it unusable. Repairing it is 200 to 300 euros (ouch).
I want to install win7 via bootcamp and I'm using my mac mini (october 2009) as an external optical drive. These are my steps:
1.hold the "t" on the mac mini
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5.Then I get a blank screen and a few seconds later the "missing operating system" message appears.
Am I missing something? Is it possible to install win7 using a mac mini as an external drive?
PS1:I already have partitioned the HD with bootcamp.
PS2:I've upgraded the hard disk drive of the macbook with a seagate momentus 500GB hard disk. Don't think this is the problem, thought I should mentioned it.

Hi Mike,
For reference it is called "IP over Firewire".
Connect the two computers with a fire wire cable. System Preferences > Network > Configure IPv4: > Manually > IP address: 192.168.3.1 (and .2 on other) > Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0. Leave the other fields blank. Do this on both computers on the computer you want to allow access to or both for two way access go to System Preference > Sharing > Select a service to change its settings. Turn remote Login on.
On the MBP go to the Finder Menu > Go > Connect to Server > Type in the IP address of the Mini 192.168.3.2 (Whatever you gave it)
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Can you re-state exactly what drives are connected to which computers, and how?
An external hard drive plugged into a PC (or, indeed, even another Mac) on your network will not automatically "show up" on your Mac mini, no matter whether it's USB, Firewire or what. The only way you can even connect to it from the Mini would be to share it out from the PC as an SMB/CIFS (Windows file sharing) share across the network.
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drive because it's a USB device. Intel minis can
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