Power Mac G4 (MDD) Superdrive won’t mount DVD-VR discs

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
May 31st, 2004 • 5:37 am

This one is rather tricky… I have a Sony DVD recorder in my living room that’s connected to my PVR unit, so that I can transfer PVR recordings on DVD for archival purposes. This DVD recorder is capable of recording DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW discs, as well as DVD-RW discs in “VR” format, also known as DVD-VR. (God, what a mess all these formats are!)

Sometimes I want to record a DVD-WR in VR format so that I can do some minimal editing that can only be done in that format (such as custom chapter markers). But then I’d like to be able to copy the resulting DVD-VR on a regular DVD-R disc for permanent archival (and more universal readability), and re-use the DVD-RW for something else.

The trouble is that, when I insert a DVD-VR disc in my Superdrive (a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-104, according to System Profiler), there is some disc activity in the Superdrive, but then the DVD volume never shows up on the desktop.

I don’t get an error message saying that the DVD-VR is unreadable or anything. It just never shows up. So of course I cannot do anything with it. I’ve tried “finalizing” the DVD-VR on the DVD recorder, but that doesn’t help.

Interestingly, if I run the small Mount Me! utility, the utility does detect a volume called “SONY_DVD_RECORDER_VOLUME” (the default name that the Sony DVD recorder gives to all the DVDs it records) and offers to mount it. If I click on the “Mount” button, I hear some disc activity and the utility displays an alert saying that the mounting was successful. But the DVD volume is nowhere to be found. And the next time I run Mount Me!, it offers to mount it again.

I could only find one reference to a similar problem in the Apple Discussions forum. Based on that discussion thread, it sounds like it’s a bug in Mac OS X 10.3 itself.

It sure is mightily frustrating.


2 Responses to “Power Mac G4 (MDD) Superdrive won’t mount DVD-VR discs”

  1. mansoormir says:

    I’m having the same problem with a Powerbook G4 and a JVC DVD-recorder. Strangely Toast 6 seems to recognise the disc even though it doesn’t show up on the desktop!

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Toast does tend to see things that the Finder doesn’t, but in most cases it’s not much help :).

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