Today is election day in Sweden. I’m watching the events unfold and it looks like we will have a change of government: from an alliance of conservatives, pseudo-liberals, Christians and farmers party turned Randian capitalists turned back to farmers party to an alliance of social democrats, socialists and the green party. The feminists have grown but doesn’t seem to make it all the way into government. And the “not racist but …” party Sweden democrats will apparently become the third biggest party in Sweden.

Is this good news or bad news? I have no idea. I’m not really happy about the last party I can tell you at least.

One reason I haven’t written in this blog for a while is because I have been busy with the latest issue of Amiga Forum. It’s a printed Amiga magazine in Swedish, well, the only printed Amiga magazine in Swedish actually. Pretty soon the latest issue will go to the printers and this is the latest draft of it’s front cover:

But I do think it’s time to do some MorphOS stuff too! So I decided to work on a problem I’ve been having for several months now. The problem is that my DVD-RW device in my G5 doesn’t burn and I have not been able to fix it. I got it to work with Frying Pan (a burning program no longer in development), but Jalapeno (the standard MorphOS burning program) claims it burns everything successfully but afterwards it doesn’t read at all. More interestingly, when I burn a CD-RW and try to burn it again in Windows it doesn’t even read as have been burned at all, only erased. I have asked the MorphOS Team for help but so far I haven’t found a solution.

Yesterday when I was at SUGA, the guys had brought a PC with them to rip for spare parts. No one wanted its IDE DVD-RW so I took it. Even though a G5 uses SATA, the CD/DVD-ROM is always IDE. Basically, it should work. So today I opened up my G5 in order to switch devices:

On the top left you can see the DVD-RW-ROM: It’s quite easy to take it out. First you remove the plugs holding it in like seen in the picture below:

Next you need to remove the power and the IDE cable. It was stuck in the device with some sort of sticky tape which was a hazzle to remove. But finally I got it out:

This is the old DVD-RW-ROM:

Note that it’s just an ordinary DVD-RW-ROM with an ordinary open button. It’s only because of Apple policy of not using buttons unless you really really have to that you can’t use it and must use it in the OS instead. This is of course a good thing anyway since it doesn’t look like a normal DVD-RW-ROM but actually is, like my new one:

But before we put it in you need to take the 4 plug screws on the bottom of the old device. Without these, the DVD-RW-ROM won’t stay still in the machine:

The picture is blurry, but I think you can see the 4 black screws. It required a little force to remove but it was easy to switch. There are holes for this on the new device as well.

I put it in, attach the power and IDE cables, plug it so it sits steady and now we are done. I close the computer and start MorphOS.

But, as it turns out the tray is too tall to open inside a G5. It just get stuck. A quick comparison shows that the tray of the old one is a lot shorter. I need to cut the new one in order to get it to work. So I decided that before doing that I should try out the new device and see if it works. I open the computer up, remove the plugs while keeping the device plugged in and start MorphOS again. I put in a CD-RW and let Jalapeno burn:

And it doesn’t work. As it turns out I get the exact same problem with this device as the former one. So it adds to my suspicion that there is some bug in Jalapeno. I don’t need to to burn a lot, but it is quite annoying not being able to do something so basic nowadays. And since this device can’t open the tray as you should I decided to go back to the old one. Sadly, this time I can’t get any program to burn anything. Before, I was able to burn a CD-RW (but not a CD-R) when I choose 8X speed but now it keeps burning in 10X+ speed anyway, which makes the disc unreadable. Frying Pan is also broken now for some reason. I have to burn in Windows from now one I guess.

Though this was a failure at least I learned something about how to switch CD/DVD-ROM:s in a G5. It’s at least something.