PC CDs suddenly not readable

Hello,
I've suddenly come across a problem, which I'm not sure I understand at all... My Macbook Pro has stopped being able to read PC burnt data CDs. CDs that have previously worked. I get the "The disk inserted was not readable by this computer" error. They work in my old PC laptop, BUT, I booted up in Boot Camp on my Macbook Pro and it only saw the CD as a blank CD, so I'm guessing it's not an OS problem.
Just to make things even more clear, PC burnt audio CDs STILL work, and Mac burnt data/audio CDs still work. So it also doesn't seem to be a problem with the optical drive itself.
I'm a bit miffed...
Cheers for any help.
Louis

I have the same issue, a CD I just got with some images doesn't read on my iMac or my MacBook Pro. I just get the message: This CD is not readable or something similar.
I see a lot of people with the same issue but no answer.

Similar Messages

Help! CDs burnt with PC suddenly not readable!

Hello,
I've suddenly come across a problem, which I'm not sure I understand at all... My Macbook Pro has stopped being able to read PC burnt data CDs. CDs that have previously worked. I get the "The disk inserted was not readable by this computer" error. They work in my old PC laptop, BUT, I booted up in Boot Camp on my Macbook Pro and it only saw the CD as a blank CD, so I'm guessing it's not an OS problem.
Just to make things even more clear, PC burnt audio CDs STILL work, and Mac burnt data/audio CDs still work. So it also doesn't seem to be a problem with the optical drive itself.
I posted this here because I think it's as relevant to... everything else as much it is to just the "optical drive" section. Seeing as some CDs still work.
I'm a bit miffed...
Cheers for any help.
Louis

I have the same issue, a CD I just got with some images doesn't read on my iMac or my MacBook Pro. I just get the message: This CD is not readable or something similar.
I see a lot of people with the same issue but no answer.

External hard drive suddenly not readable

Help!
I have an external 160GB hard drive (LaCie; Firewire connection) that has suddenly stopped mounting on my desktop. I have used this drive with no problem for ages and with OSX 10.4.
Now I get the message:
'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.'
With three options: Initialize; Ignore; Eject.
I have lots of valuable data on this drive that I need to access. What can I do? I have looked at Disk Utility and the disk shows but still will not mount.
Please help!

External hard drive spontaneously unmounted? Try these tips:
NEW FIRMWARE: Try updating your external hard drive's firmware, which is available from your drive manufacturers Web site--or just use VersionTracker's (www.versiontracker.com) search function to find it. Be sure to back up your data before applying the update, and carefully follow the manufacturers instructions.
OUT OF iSIGHT: If you're using an iSight camera while you're using a FireWire drive, the camera may be interfering with the drive's ability to stay mounted. Try temporarily disconnecting your iSight and moving it to a separate FireWire port. If you have multiple FireWire devices, try using a FireWire hub.
POWER PROBLEM: A faulty power adapter could be causing your drive to unmount. Your drive may not be getting enough juice to stay on, causing the drive to turn off and thereby unmounting it from your Mac. Alternately, the power adapter may not be providing a steady amount of power, causing your drive to turn on and off. Try replacing the adapter. If you can't get a replacement adapter from the hard drive manufacturer, try your local electronics store. Just make sure the adapter you choose has the same connector and input/output voltage. you can find the input/output voltage on the adapter itself.
Cheers!
DALE

External Seagate drive suddenly "not readable" by iMac

I'm having a problem with a Seagate Backup Plus external desktop hard drive.
It was working fine, but then I restarted my computer and got a window with the error message: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." and options to Initialize…, Ignore, or Eject.
I rebooted my computer a few times, and each time I get the same error message. When I open Disk Utility, I see the hard drive listed in the side bar, but it is not mounted and will not mount. Each time it is labeled something like "disk2s2," "disk10s2" or "disk6s2," etc. That changes slightly each time like that, but seems to always begin with "disk" and end with "s2."
I ran repair disk and got the following result:
The drive is about three months old. I think it did something like this when I first bought it (I remember seeing the "disk2s2" label in the Disk Utility sidebar), but restarting solved it then. Now it seems to keep happening every time I restart.
I would really appreciate any help or information any of you can provide.

External hard drive spontaneously unmounted? Try these tips:
NEW FIRMWARE: Try updating your external hard drive's firmware, which is available from your drive manufacturers Web site--or just use VersionTracker's (www.versiontracker.com) search function to find it. Be sure to back up your data before applying the update, and carefully follow the manufacturers instructions.
OUT OF iSIGHT: If you're using an iSight camera while you're using a FireWire drive, the camera may be interfering with the drive's ability to stay mounted. Try temporarily disconnecting your iSight and moving it to a separate FireWire port. If you have multiple FireWire devices, try using a FireWire hub.
POWER PROBLEM: A faulty power adapter could be causing your drive to unmount. Your drive may not be getting enough juice to stay on, causing the drive to turn off and thereby unmounting it from your Mac. Alternately, the power adapter may not be providing a steady amount of power, causing your drive to turn on and off. Try replacing the adapter. If you can't get a replacement adapter from the hard drive manufacturer, try your local electronics store. Just make sure the adapter you choose has the same connector and input/output voltage. you can find the input/output voltage on the adapter itself.
Cheers!
DALE

HELP, external hard drive suddenly "not readable"

Hi everyone,
It appears that my external hard drive that held most of my film material is messed up. It's not being recognized by my mac and the drive was really hot when I touched it.
I have to try to figure this out as on this drive I have 100's of hours of edited material in this one film that I was almost finished with.
Does anyone know anything about this type of stuff, what might of happened and how I might be able to recover the drive?
I'm so lost right now.
It's a 250GB western digital.
when i reboot, the mac sees there is a new drive attached and asks if I want to format the new unformatted drive. To be exact it says:
The drive you inserted was not readable by this computer.
The it provides the following buttons: INITIALIZE - IGNORE - EJECT
Please, any help would be sooooo appreciated.
Jay

Open the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder and try using the Repair Disk function on the drive; if it doesn't work, an utility such as TechTool Pro or DiskWarrior may be able to repair the drive. If you have AppleCare for that machine, you have or can get TechTool Deluxe, which can be used for this task.
(18251)

CDs Suddenly Not Importing...?

I was putting CDs into my CD player and they were opening in iTunes for Importing. Suddenly, I am unable to do this.
I just put in a BRAND NEW CD into my CD player and it won't open in iTunes. What is happening? What else can I do? Is there a setting that I altered somewhere?

Here's what it says:
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Dell Inc. Dimension 4700
iTunes 6.0.1.3
CD Driver 2.0.4.3
CD Driver DLL 2.0.3.2
LowerFilters: PxHelp20 (2.0.0.0), drvmcdb (1.0.0.1), sscdbhk5 (1.0.0.1),
UpperFilters: GEARAspiWDM (2.0.4.3),
Video Driver: Intel(R) 82915G/GV/910GL Express Chipset Family\Intel(R) 82915G/GV/910GL Express Chipset
IDE\DiskMaxtor6Y080M0_________________________YAR51HW0, Bus Type ATA, Bus Address [0,0]
Current user is administrator.

External hard drive files suddenly not readable

This keeps happening to my hard drives for no apparent reason. I use an external drive to backup my macbook pro contents, eventually, I cannot open the files. I get an error message saying they may be damaged and their preview icon defaults back to the system original. The file is there, with the same file size but I cannot open them......
This happend with my time machine and 2 external drives. Disk rescue and similar programs do not work.
Any suggestions?

Hi Barry,
thanks for your answer! The hard disk with my time machine backups on it is the same hard disk I successfully used to migrate my "old" files (from the Leopoard installation) to the new Snow Leopard based system (through the migration process during the installtion). I expected that this time machine backups would be still available and that I could use the same external hard disk to resume the time machine backup on the new system. Hope this was understandable?
But I am still wondering how this could happen while it worked obviously fine during the installation itself.
I understand that I could just reformat but then my old backups would be gone
But probably this is the easiest solution.
Thanks! And: yes! I am from Munich (Germany

DVDs not readable, but data CDs are

All of a sudden my iBook stopped reading media DVDs. After I insert a disc, an error message appears, saying "Disc Insertion/ The disc you inserted was not readable by this computer." The DVDs will play in a normal DVD player. Data CDs will still play on my iBook, however. Is there anything I can do by myself or do I need to take it in to an Apple Store?

Hello, apaustian
I have an identical problem on both my iBookG4 and my iMacG5. the G4 has only a combo drive; the G5 has a superdrive. If I weren't so frustrated I would laugh when the G5 tells me a DVD I just burned with iDVD "is not readable by this computer." (it's actually not readable by either but is still readable by my good old Sony Windows and my Samsung dvd/vcr combo....:-)
I have seen (in other posts) discussions about the necessity of Helvetica.dfont (note the d) and I can't find it in my iBook. Do you have this font in your machine? (if not, any idea how we can find it without a complete re-install? I mean, we left Windows to avoid these problems didn't we?)

Audio CDs get "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer"

Hi All,
This a near-duplicate of a message originally posted to the Snow Leopard forums.
A couple months ago I upgraded to 10.6.4 from Leopard and configured a Boot Camp partition running Windows 7. Yesterday I discovered that whenever I put any audio CD, retail or burned, into the Macbook's drive I now get this message - "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" - with the options to ignore or eject. Disk Utility displays no unusual information, but a check of the system log on Console turned up this:
Sep 8 11:05:21 Hard-Drive diskarbitrationd17: unable to probe /dev/disk1 (status code 0x00000047).
Has anyone encountered this problem before? I suspect it's related to Boot Camp but not to the initial installation - CD reading worked fine right after the install. Note that this only affects CDs - Burned and retail DVDS read without any trouble.
Michael
P.S. The CDs tested include one just out of the shrink wrap, so please, no "have you checked your CDs they may be scratched" replies.

Thanks, but no thanks. This is a software/hardware (driver?) issue, not a hardware issue alone. I kept a bootable backup copy of my 10.5.8 installation on an external drive, and a quick restart into that yields a desktop where CDs still load perfectly. I'm looking for power users with specific experience with this particular error and insights into what is causing it in 10.6.4.
Message was edited by: mlach, who is tired from simultaneously troubleshooting this and an X11 error and has forgotten how to type.

Why does my memory stick all of a sudden trigger the message "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer"?

I bought a LaCie memory stick a couple of months ago. It worked fine. Now all of a sudden I get the message "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer". What has happened? Is all my data lost? Can I retrieve it? I tried to fix it with Disk Utility (which at least correctly recognises the stick), and even though I can click on my memory stick I can't do anything to it. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

According to an ASC member who claims to work for HP, this issue can be resolved by repairing the permissions of the startup volume in Disk Utility. I can't confirm, but it has apparently worked in at least one case.

Suddenly my 1 TB Western Digital external hard drive has decided to give me a "the disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" error

I was playing music on iTunes (my iTunes library is stored on the hard drive) when I realized that it was running slow and giving me some pinwheels. So, I force quit iTunes, ejected the hard drive, waited a couple of seconds and plugged it back in. To my surprise it gave me an error that said "The disk you insterted is not readable by this computer" with the options to initialize, ignore, and eject. I have been searching Google, YouTube, and other forums for fixes (I am not too handy with Terminal without some assistance). I am able to go to Disk Utility and I see the drive there, and when I go to the partition is says "not mounted" I have tried repairing the disk only to get the notificiation that tells me Disk Utility is unable to repair the disk. I also ran Terminal and tried doing diskutil repairDisk and repairVolume to no avail. Below you can see the information I have gotten from Disk Ultilty and Terminal. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated as I have my music library, art projects, and other very important data on this drive! Thank you in advance!

Yikes, doesn't look too good. But there are still things you can try.
I noticed the disk is formatted as MS-DOS FAT32. While such disks can be read and used on Macs, it's better to set up your disks formatted for the Mac. For one thing, the Mac disk repair tools don't work as well on FAT32 (PC-style) disks. Which might be why Disk Utility did not succeed.
I suggest using a PC running Windows to connect the drive to and see if the data are all visible, and if not, run the built in disk check tools in Windows. Also, WD disks usually come with disk tools on the drive, did yours come with those? Either for the PC and/or Mac? You might be able to download them from the WD sites.

All of a sudden my CDs will not load into my iTunes ...

I just recently noticed that cds will not load into my library, nor will iTunes prompt me to play them when inserted. You can hear the machine plunking along as if trying to read it, then it will automatically eject. What gives? Have not had this problem before...I am running iTunes 9 on a iMac with OS 10.4. thanks.

Hey aj5c,
Let's see if resetting Safari helps the issue:
Safari 6 (OS X Mountain Lion): Reset Safari
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11914
For best results, make sure all of the options are checked.
Thanks,
Matt M.

CD not readable but DVD works

My early 2010 MBP has started shwoing the following error when I insert a CD:
"The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer."
DVDs play with no problem at all and also, if I chose the ignore the ignore option to the CD error above, I can use the old Songbird app to rip music from CDs in to FLAC format - again with no problem. I ran a CD cleaner through the drive but no difference.
I have also tried starting the macbook with 'D' pressed to get the hardware diagnostics but this just gives me a white screen for a while before booting up normally.
Running Mavericks, Verified, disk and repaired permissions.
Thanks in advance.

I've already used a cleaning CD to no effect.
It still reads CDs using songbird, however I can no longer import them into itunes. I've tried redownloading itunes as well.
I have since dug out the CDROMs/DVDs that came with it(which play ok) and did a 'D' restart to do a diagnostics test and it didn't find any errors at all.

External HDD: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer"

Hi,
I have an external drive with important data on it (there is a backup, but there is also some non-backuped data as well...). I cannot access the external drive because I receive a "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" message connecting it. I was wondering, if you have some advice on how to get my data back?
I have a WD Elements 2 TB (about 2 months old), I am using is with an iMac, latest Snow Leopard. The drive used to work all fine. Now, I receive a "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" every time I connect it. Same thing happens if connected to my MacBook Pro.
What happened?: I was copying files to the external drive. I the middle of it, I received a message complaining I that assumedly ejected the drive by pulling the USB cable out instead of properly ejecting it software-side (I did not do this). The drive symbol was gone. Now, I plug the drive out an reconnected it. The drive symbol showed up again. I continued copying files on the drive, but after some 30 seconds, I received the same error message again. One more time, I disconnected and reconnected the drive - this time to another USB port. The drive showed up, but I was not able to copy files on it (I am using muCommander, it just kept showing 0kb progress). I restarted the Mac. Since then I am getting the "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." The drive symbol does not show up anymore.
I was googling the problem: in one forum there was a suggestion to click "initialize drive" and than to "repair" in DiscUtility. I clicked initialize drive and the drive is shown in DiscUtility, but "repair" and "verify" are greyed out. I read more posts on it, one posts suggested NOT to click initialize because that means format in Mac OS language (btw: ***, why is it not called format).
That is the situation at the moment. What is the best - if there is - way to get my data back? DiscWarrior?
I very much appreciate your advice!
Daniel

"Initializing" a drive has been normal computer terminology for decades. "Formatting" generally referred to the high-level preparation also called "erasing." None of this is "Mac OS language."
Disk Warrior will not likely fix the problem you have. DW can repair a damaged directory, but your error suggests an even worse problem of directory corruption. I suggest you try using DW if you have it. Visit the Alsoft site to determine the limitations and usage of the version you have. It may not be able to boot your computer depending upon what version of DW you have and how new your computer is.
If you have no success with DW then see the following:
Basics of File Recovery
Files in Trash
If you simply put files in the Trash you can restore them by opening the Trash (left-click on the Trash icon) and drag the files from the Trash to your Desktop or other desired location. OS X also provides a short-cut to undo the last item moved to the Trash -press COMMAND-Z.
If you empty the Trash the files are gone. If a program does an immediate delete rather than moving files to the Trash, then the files are gone. Recovery is possible but you must not allow any additional writes to the hard drive - shut it down. When files are deleted only the directory entries, not the files themselves, is modified. The space occupied by the files has been returned to the system as available for storage, but the files are still on the drive. Writing to the drive will then eventually overwrite the space once occupied by the deleted files in which case the files are lost permanently. Also if you save a file over an existing file of the same name, then the old file is overwritten and cannot be recovered.
General File Recovery
If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive. Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk. Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads.
The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.

"The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" error message

Hello. I've had my iMac for a little over three months and I've encountered a strange problem. I play Warcraft III, and whenever I insert the disk into the drive, I get an error message saying "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" and it gives me the options to ignore or eject. I've gotten the same message with Starcraft as well. I also tried putting in the iPod Nano install disk with the same result. CD-Rs and Audio cds work smoothly though. I called Apple technical support and they told me to call 1-800-MY-APPLE to schedule an appointment with my local branch to bring it in. I just wanted to make sure no one on these forums can help me. All help is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.
iMac (Early 2006) Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Steve, the original poster made clear he was on a core duo iMAC which ONLY runs OS X (discounting non Apple OSes of course!)
Therefore there is no extension manager. But I guess he would thank you for trying to help anyway.

PC CDs suddenly not readable

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