ok well ive finally got round to making a firewire cdrw and have got sum intresting results...i decided to take the cheap road and get a samsung 24x10x40 crdw...and ive seen some strange behaviour...

- for a start it reads cd's fine...when you put in a blank disk, a dialog pops up asking you to format the disk for burning...

- itunes however still says 'no compatible burners found'...

- and apple system profiler says that my mouse is a usb cdrw, which is the thing thats confusing me the most, but at least it says its a samsung cdrw which is good i guess...

i dunno how its got mixed up as a usb device...any of you hardcore techie guys wana fill me in on this??

so...basically it works...however there are some flaws...i may try another firewire case, but my advice to anyone is dont go the cheap road get a sony drive...its almost guranteed to work fine...

Mike, over at xlr8yourmac has a forum dedicated
to the use of different PC CDRW drives in Macs.
My suggestion for anyone before they buy a non-
strictly-supported drive is to check his forum out
at:

http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/
search.drivedb.lasso

JT, you would be well served to check out this
forum for any recommendations or support on the
particular mechanism you purchased for use on
your Mac. I know they have different hacks for
allowing iTunes support and the like for many
CDRW mechanisms.

James

thanks for your advice james...i dont know why i never found that forum before...but it was good...i hacked the samsung driver to support the burner and itunes recognises it now...apple system profiler still is a different story but im assuming that thats related to the firewire case im using...

so if i add it all up, the burner cost me $120 NZD and i expect a new 5.25" firewire case to cost me around $350 NZD...all in all i reckon ive saved almost $200 compared to a low end firewire cdrw or even the zip cdrw...

i feel quite pleased with myself right now :)