PatchBurn Awesome SuperDrive Tool

As you know, Apple wants to you to buy new Mac to use it's built in DVD Burning Software for iTunes, iDVD 5, and Burn from the Finder.

5 years ago, I bought a new QuickSilver PowerMac G4 with a 2x DVD Burner. It is a genuine SuperDrive. This year, I swapped out the 2x with an Pioneer 16x DVD Burner. It the same make and model that comes with the G5's under Tiger.

Under Tiger, the drive was seen as an Apple SuperDrive. But due to some incompatiblities with my ACARD 6890M Raid (see Previous Blog), I was force to downgrade back the the Black Cat OS, Panther. Under Panther, the same drive was "unsupported."

It first I was bummed and didn't know what to do. I even tried taking the DVD Kernel Extensions from Tiger and moving them to Panther. Not a good idea and it does not work because the device information for both Panther and Tiger is stored somewhere else. Plus this will ruin the driver for Panther and the DVD drive not work at all.

PATCHBURN to the RESCUE.

I found a cool utility called, PatchBurn. It works great and it will take most unsupported DVD Burners at trick Jaguar, Panther or Tiger into thinking your Drive is a genuine SuperDrive.

http://www.patchburn.de/

PatchBurn is a tool to patch existing CD/DVD-drivers (under Mac-OS X 10.2.x) or to generate and install new device profiles (under Mac-OS 10.3.x and later). It allows many, otherwise unsupported burners to be used directly with Mac-OS X, iTunes and DiscBurner.

http://www.patchburn.de/download.html

It's a great tool. 5 stars *****
I immediately sent the auther 5 euros after it saved my 16x DVD SuperDrive $80 eBay investment.

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