I upgraded to Leopard on Tuesday night and I’ve been really enjoying everything so far. There are a few minor annoyances (I can’t print to a network printer), a few major annoyances (Xcode crashes constantly), but in general it’s a great upgrade from Tiger.

The thing I was most looking forward to, however, was installing Windows via Boot Camp and then playing everything in the Orange Box (which arrived along with my Leopard DVD and a 500GB external USB drive to use for Time Machine).

I fought with Boot Camp for a little while over the partitioning of my drive (it was struggling to move some large files – I had to move them to an external drive), but eventually everything worked and I was ready to install Windows.

I inserted the CD and… nothing.

It wouldn’t read the CD.

I’ve had problems with the drive for the last few months (I haven’t been able to burn anything), but I’ve been too busy to investigate the problem further. I had a search around the interwebs and found some discussions that didn’t improve my mood much.

Superdrive Update 2.1 killed drive

The gist of the problem is that a firmware update that Apple provided via Software Update in June broke a lot of drives. Some people had no problems, others couldn’t burn anything but they could read discs fine, and some drives just died completely.

This happened to people that applied the firmware update correctly (ie, not just to people who restarted when they shouldn’t have, or in some other way messed with the firmware update magic).

I have AppleCare (and therefore a warranty until late 2009), so Apple (or an Authorised Service Provider) will be able to fix the problem (replace the drive). Unfortunately, most of the service providers are a long way away, and they want the Macbook Pro for 7-10 days.

So I’m really quite frustrated and annoyed. I can’t be without the MBP because of all the work I have to do, and I can’t install Windows or Portal or Team Fortress 2, or burn anything until I’m able to be without it for a couple of weeks.

Mood: disappointed and annoyed.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 12:31 am and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.