G4 MDD Superdrive Mod
Well, if there’s anything to be learned from adding a Pioneer 107 (Superdrive) DVD Burner to my mirror drive door G4, it’s that I should pay more attention to the advice of others. Numerous people on this site reported it necessary to remove the tray’s front lip (the part with the DVD logo on it) to clear the rounded openings in each of the case’s optical bays.
In some unexplainable state of denial, I thought for sure I wouldn’t need to do such senseless and ugly modifications. Three attempts at switching things around and a lost screw somewhere in the bowls of my computer later, I discovered I was wrong. There is no avoiding the removal of the tray’s front lip. Well, accept that I did put it back on, but modified
it slightly with a hack saw, giving it rounded corners for just enough open/close clearance.
Jonathan Ive, the Mac community loves you, but you gotta watch putting rounded corners where only square ones belong. That being said, this drive works and burns beautifully using Toast. I’m still a little hesitant to do yet another hack to get my iLife applications fully recognized, but the rumor mill has it that 10.3.3 will solve that problem. I think I might hold out until then and report on my findings a little later.
UPDATE: As luck would have it, 10.3.3 came out a day after I made this post. Not wasting any time, I completed the update, rebooted, and sure enough the System Profiler now shows my PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-107D as “Apple Supported/Shipped.” I don’t have any media on hand to really test it out, but I assume it will be smooth sailing from here on.
