DVD Drive Issues

Ali C. · #1 06-12-2009, 07:46 AM

I've used the Rosewill mentioned in the sig with OS X for ages but only occasionally, as it required me to shut off my computer and plug it in (3 IDE devices on a mobo with one IDE bus and SATA=fail by user). Now that I have a SATA drive hooked up and thus the DVD drive running full-time, I've noticed an issue or two I suspect is due to OS X.
Namely, some DVDs conjure a "disk cannot be read" error, some don't. When this error occurs it's usually accompanied by the drive spinning up and down repeatedly until I get it to eject (which can take a few tries). If it recognizes the disc, I have no trouble ejecting it. However, SOME of the discs that it can recognize (again, namely DVDs, I have seen no problems with CDs as of yet) have read issues and can trip up DVD Player into "skipping damaged areas". To make matters even weirder, if the drive is inactive for awhile OS X suddenly can't read the disc and I have to eject and reload to get it sorted. This can happen with nearly any disc, DVD or CD.
It sounds like a hardware problem. However, the kicker is, there's no problems in Windows with the same discs that are "unreadable". And install discs OS X can't recognize boot easy as pie.
This leads me to suspect I've got an OS issue on my hands. I'm guessing it's a southbridge kext bug (SB700). Has anyone else had something odd like this with their optical drive? What's going on here, folks?

(Thanks in advance to any advice offered)

uman · #2 06-12-2009, 01:55 PM

Did you boot with -f to force the kext cache to be reloaded? If you just switch from an IDE drive to a SATA without reloading the kext cache, you will get errors.

Ali C. · #3 06-12-2009, 06:47 PM

Heh, didn't know that. Even though OS X detects the new hard drive as ATA (doesn't affect the SATA speed or NCQ powers

), and I'm having no problems aside from the DVD burner I'll give that a try.

Ali C. · #4 06-15-2009, 08:28 AM

Bumped with update.
-F has *no* effect on the drive. Starting to look like these super-fast-and-good-for-hard-drives kexts I swear by might be to blame. Hmmmmmm.

thorazine74 · #5 06-15-2009, 08:57 AM

You dont really need to refresh the kext cache when you exchange a piece of hardware, if you have a valid kext installed it will be loaded as soon as you plug in the new hardware.
Your post is very confusing on the details (did you switch from IDE DVD to SATA or you use the same IDE DVD in a new controller?) but you should find out which kext you are using for the IDE & SATA and try to find an alternative one.
If your SATA drives are being detected as ATA you are probably using AppleVIAATA or similar catch-it-all kext which might have troubles with SB700 (less speed and no NCQ of course). Try switching to AHCI and it should improve a lot. As for the IDE I dont know which kext supports SB700 IDE ports, there was some AppleATIATA port but I'm not sure if the IDE controller in SB700 is supported.