Audio CDs and OSX
Some time after I got my PowerBook, I noticed that my combo drive had a problem with reading audio CDs. It was somewhat bizarre — it could read data CDs and DVDs fine, it burned fine, but slipping in an audio CD brought up a complaint that OSX was unable to mount the volume. Given that I rarely read audio CDs, I had no idea if my drive was faulty from the beginning, or that a software update had caused something to misbehave. Digging around on the Web yielded no practical advice.
So the mystery remained ... until today.
My PowerBook refused to boot properly this morning. Several restarts with various key combinations weren't helpful — my screen remained black and a CD that I'd unwittingly left in the drive — thinking that it should be okay for the trip into work — would not eject. Cursing Apple for excluding a manual CD eject mechanism, I brought it into to the Mac Clinic (whose service is much better than their Web site), and the technician managed to get my screen to respond with a couple of ordinary reboots, as far as I could tell. (You know how it is — it works when the helpdesk or service centre technician touches it, even if they might not be doing anything different from what you have been — I say this as a helpdesker, as well as a helpdeskee ...). And so I told him about the weird problem my drive was been having with audio CDs, in case he had any ideas.
On an educated hunch, he created a new user, and slotted in an audio CD. It mounted. So, logically, he concluded there was something strange with my user account settings, and recommended that I copy out my files and recreate my user account.
No small task, given the amount of things I do on this computer. It has taken me all day, and by dinner-time practically everything was working again, I'd almost gotten everything customised back to what it was — I was careful to only move the essentials ... but I wasn't quite careful enough.
Copying some files back to "Library/Preferences/" somehow caused the combo drive to stop mounting audio CDs again. Given that I knew what I had been modifying ... a little bit of investigation yielded this: the silly little audio CD bug was caused by a file named "CD Info.cidb" found in "Library/Preferences/" within my home directory. I renamed the file to something else so that it would not be detected, and voilà ... my combo drive works.
Blimey, is all I can say.
Posted by sniffles at July 09, 2003 11:16 PM