Troubleshooting Disc Burner: Problems with SCSI drives; canceled burns and hidden images; more

Following up on yesterday's report:

Disc Burner (but not iTunes) problems with SCSI drives Dave Kupiec confirms other reports that Disc Burner 1.0.1 does not work with SCSI versions of the "officially supported" drives. However, iTunes typically does work. He writes: "I'm running OS 9.1 on my PowerCenter G3/400 and happily burning CDs with iTunes 1.1. My CD-RW drive is a Yamaha external SCSI 8424- one of the officially supported drives. But Disc Burner 1.0.1 does absolutely nothing- discs don't mount and the Disc Burner app does not recognize them either. Strange that iTunes likes it, but not Disc Burner. And yes, I've turned off the Toast CD Reader extension and tried all on/off combos of 3rd party CD extensions."

Michael Battenfield had virtually the same experience with the same drive. He opened a MacFixIt Forums thread (Disc Burner still worthless to some) on the topic.

We have too many other reports of this matter to list them all. Here is a sampling: Roberto Ruiz-Velasco had the problem with a Yamaha 6416 CD-RW (SCSI). Isaac Rivera had the same problem with a Plextor PX-R412C (Smart & Friendly enclosure; SCSI interface). George Paphitis had these same symptoms with a QPS CD-R PX-W8432T drive. In some of these cases, an error message that says something like "this computer is not supported" or "this program is incompatible with your computer' appears.

Failed/Canceled burns and hidden disk images Clint Roberts was unable to get Disc Burner to work with a USB LaCie 4x2x8 Mits IDE CD Writer: "I am able to prepare a CD when inserted in the Writer, drag items to it and thus create a hidden disc image. However, when I attempt to Burn the CD, the progress bar is shown and nothing happens. I left the machine like this for half an hour and still no progress. I eventually cancel the burn." Another reader has now confirmed this exact problem with this same drive.

Speaking of canceling a burn, When David Leveen tried to eject a CD-R that he thought he had burned successfully, he got the alert message asking if he wanted to "Cancel, Burn, or Discard." He selected to Cancel. Apparently as a result, the invisible image file created when he tried to burn the CD was not deleted. After trying this a few times, he wound up getting a collection of these files that almost used up all the free space on his drive. Using File Buddy to find and delete these files solved the problem.

English-International not good enough A couple of readers (including David Kiltz and Terence Chua) found that Disc Burner 1.0.1 will not install on English-International systems. This is to be expected, as Apple's web page lists the software as "English-North American" only.

Update: Karl Antz writes: "By extracting the relevant files (Disk Burner/Disc Burner Extension etc.) with TomeViewer, I got it to work on my English-International system."

Multi-session or not? David Duke points out that TIL article #58770 (on Apple's CD-RW and SuperDrive) states: "DVD-R/CD-RW drives can write multiple sequential sessions to a CD-R disc." However TIL article #58804 (on Disc Burner) states: "The CDs you create are 'single-session' discs. You can burn each CD-R only once; any extra space on the disc cannot be reused or recovered." This two sentences are not necessarily contradictory, but some clarification would certainly be useful.

Update: An Authorized Apple Service Provider replies: "The Disc Burner software from Apple is only capable of burnning single sessions, leaving the rest of the CD-R useless. But you can burn multi-session disks using Toast or similar software."

DiskProxyLib error A reader tried launching Disc Burner 1.0.1 on a Power Mac G4 500 DP and got the following error message: "The application could not be opened because 'DiskProxyLib' could not be found." This typically means that some file that should be enabled in your Extensions folder is not there.

Update: In this case, the problem may be the Finder. Harold Roeth writes: "I had this error but could not find DiskProxyLib anywhere. I then realized that I had not installed Finder version 9.1.1 from the Disk Burner install package. After installing Finder 9.1.1, that error went away."

Ricoh combo-drive success Adding to the successful reports from last time, Danny Wong writes: "Disc Burner 1.0.1 does support new Ricoh Drive 12x10x32 CDRW/8xDVD-ROM combo-drive, even in my customized third-party FireWire casing. After install this new driver, I could play any new DVD movies and CD, CD-R or CD-RW discs without fail nor halt."