It was a zombie drive or half dead. Drove it's owner nuts since they couldn't accept the drive was dead. Yes it played CDs but not the DVD anymore. It took about a year for them to give in and swap the drive out. I even got lucky and was able to show them another drive doing the same thing without a PC or Mac attached. Then I'd put a new drive in and the problem would disappear. Even then it was another 6 months till they replaced the drive. No one knows how much time they spent "trying to fix it."
In closing, see if new firmware is out for said drive.
Bob
Hello again..
My newly revived ibook is great,but i have a few problems that i just can't work out & im hoping you guys might be able to help me please.
The ibook is 500MHz PowerPC G3
Dual USB
256 MB SDRAM
DVD/CD Combo
Firewire
Mac OS X Version 10.3.9
I seem to have three problems,the date keeps reverting back to 1970,the mouse/trackpad won't work no matter what i try,and i can't play dvd's.
For the moment i would be grateful of any suggestions about the dvd problem. All i can tell you is that music cd's play fine as do the OS cd's but the movies just keep ejecting after about 10 seconds. There is also a clicking noise coming from the dvd drive when a dvd is in it but not when a cd is in it.
The only movie software i have is imovie,so this morning i downloaded Apple DVD software but that hasn't made any difference,infact i can't get it to run. I think thats something to do with not having a classic system folder? So maybe the dvd software i downloaded was for an older version but im sure it was for OS X..
Iv googled the problem with the dvd as well as searched it here on Cnet but i can't find a thread which properly matches my problem,so i keep going round in circles.
Thanks everyone.

Chowhound
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