Entering A World Of Mac

February 10, 2005

With Rebekah getting her new iBook tomorrow, she decided to clean everything off her old one and let me start playing with it this evening. After a clean install of Mac OS 10.3, I was sitting with the default background wondering what to do now. The first thing we did was remove her old bad hard drive so I have a single 80 GB hard drive in the tower. The next thing was to install my DVD burner and see if that worked. It involved some fighting with the tower, but we did get it installed. Upon startup, I put a blank CD in and it spit it right out saying that it couldn’t do anything with it. System Info confirmed that it could not use it as a burner, which made me quite sad.

I decided to search the web to see if there was a way to make the drive work, but the drivers web page had nothing. I then did a random search for unsupported burners in OS X to see if there was a better one I should invest in. To my surprise I found a web site about unsupported burners that suggested trying a freeware program called PatchBurn II. You run this program, select your drive and it is supposed to work. I was quite sceptical, but thought I would give it a shot. I ran the program, restarted and to my surprise, iTunes showed it as a good burner. I decided to pop in a blank CD, it offered to burn it without problem. Amazed, I thought I should try a blank DVD+R thinking there was no way that would work. Honestly, I was just concerned about burning CDs in iTunes. I put the DVD+R in and the OS recognized it as a blank DVD. I copied a test file over and attempted to burn it. It worked perfectly! This one freeware program that doesn’t have a web site or anything saved me buying a new DVD burner. To the creator, you rule, and I have decided to host a copy of the SIT file on my site. Anyone can download it by clicking the link below. Overall, it was a good first night with my Mac.

3 Comments

Here are three things to try:

Install 10.3.8
Test Safari on Pr0n sites?
Try burning the Pr0n on optical media so it will last a really long time.

Comment by ScatASStic — 2/10/2005 @ 2:05 pm

As a future information professional, I feel a duty to voice my strong disagreement with the actions suggested above. Optical media has a dangerously short life, unsuitable for archival needs. I recommend either a tape backup of your Safari’d pr0n or, if that is not economically feasible, a RAID 1 array.