Troubleshooting CD-RW drives: booting from a CD-RW drive; mounting CD-RW discs in a DVD-RAM drive; making a bootable CD

Some troubleshooting tidbits we discovered while working with a LaCie FireWire CD-RW drive: Cannot boot from CD-RW FireWire drive Any bootable discs mounted by the CD-RW drive, including the original System Install CD that came with my Mac, would not be listed as bootable in the Startup Disk control panel. The discs would of course be bootable from any other drive. It appears that the Mac's firmware still prohibits booting from FireWire CD drives (even though booting from FireWire hard drives is now support; see this TIL article). Adaptec confirmed this. DVD-RAM drive would not mount CD-RW discs No CD-RW discs created with our LaCie drive would mount on the DVD-RAM drive that came with my Power Mac G4 500. The same discs would mount fine on the CD-RW drive itself or on the DVD-ROM drive in our iMac. CD-R discs would mount fine on all drives. This appears to be an extension of other CD-related problems with DVD-RAM drives, as reported here before, but may be specific to the particular drive and DVD-RAM combo we are using. Solving a problem writing a bootable CD We could not get Toast 4.1.2 to create a bootable CD with our FireWire CD-RW drive. It created the CD just fine, but it would not work as a bootable CD. When we had previously tried this with Toast 4.1, it had succeeded. We eventually solved the problem by uninstalling all Toast software and reinstalling 4.1 and then immediately upgrading to 4.1.2. We are still not sure of the cause of the original symptom. Perhaps it was just a one-time glitch. However, we are investigating the possibility that QuickTime 5 FireWire extensions are involved (as we had disabled them during our troubleshooting work).