old DVD-RAM drives, are they usable to write to modern new DVD-RAM media? - Macintosh Garden

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2014, October 4 - 11:54pm

#1

supernova777's picture

supernova777

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Joined: 2013 Mar 18

old DVD-RAM drives, are they usable to write to modern new DVD-RAM media?

hey there guys
i was doing some great amount of research trying to figure out a way to burn dvds larger then 4gb on mac os 9..
a friend succeeded in burning a DVD+R DL disc with his pioneer drive but afterwards the disc was not readable by mac os 9.. but worked fine when read in a modern mac running osx.
does anyone know why this would have been??

also,
during the course of the research i found alot out about the old DVD-RAM drives that was an upgrade custom BTO option i think for the powermac beginning with the b&w g3, and then the g4 sawtooth, and gigabit ethernet models. I discovered documents on using drive setup to initialize these optical dvd-ram's and that they may be used also to boot.... what interested me was the rewritability of these discs is much greater then +RW or -RW media... and that they are also said to last up to 30 years which makes them very ideal for backing up important data.

my question is.. can u use new DVD-RAM media (still purchasable, tho scarce to find) with these
older powermac g3/g4 issued DVD-RAM drives????.. most people would have replaced these drives due to their incompatibility with CD-RW, & +RW, -RW dvds.. i feel sick to my stomach to remember that i hvae personally pitched probably about 10 of these drives in the dumpster... not understanding that they did indeed posess write abilities that are different + in some ways superior to +R/-R +RW/-RW, if you have the right media "DVD-RAM" discs.

does anyone have a DVD-RAM drive still in their mac?
would u be willing to test the drive's write capabilities with a new DVD-RAM disc?
these discs cost about 10$ EACH but they can be utilized very much like a hard drive
in that you can copy small files one at a time to the disc, as you work, rather then preparing all your files + burning all at once. The combination of features + reusability has me intrigued!!!!!

here is the thread in which i (re)discoverd these facts
http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1826.0

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2014, October 5 - 8:17am

#2

sfp1954's picture

sfp1954

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Joined: 2013 Dec 29

Did he use the DVD-ROM (UDF) format in Toast? I would try that and the Mac only option (but I think the Universal Disk Format would be most likely to work). I'll try some things tomorrow.
Toast 5.2.1 was release in December 2001. So there's a rather large gap between the last Toast to run on 9.2.2 and the release of the first drive to perform Dual Layer +R burning.

Toast 5.2.3 only supports CD burning so you're not going to be burning DVDs in MacOS 9.2.2 (at least not with Toast).

2014, October 5 - 6:02pm

#3

sfp1954's picture

sfp1954

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Today I burnt two Kodak +R DL disks using Toast 10/ Snow Leopard/ 3GHz Quad Core Mac Pro.
One I specified as DVD-ROM (UDF), the other as Mac Only.
Both were seen without problem in MacOS 9.2.2 on a G4 Quicksilver.

2014, October 5 - 8:33pm

#4

WhosIt.There's picture

WhosIt.There

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Joined: 2014 Aug 23

DVD+R DL disc with his pioneer drive but afterwards the disc was not readable by mac os 9.

Could be a problem caused by a faulty DVD drive on the Mac OS 9 computer, missing driver software in the Mac OS 9 System Folder, a low-quality brand of writeable-DVD disc, etc. (I'm of course assuming you aren't silly enough to try to use a DVD disc in a CD drive on the Mac OS 9 computer.)