Chosen Solution
I replaced a clients SuperDrive in their A1181 with a brand new GSA-S10N SuperDrive (it’s stated on this site that this drive will work in this machine). Other than it being louder than the original drive (are they usually?) it played CDs, DVDs and read discs just fine. We returned it to the client and collected for the job. 3 days later the MacBook was returned to us as the drive still played/read disc but it would not burn CDs or DVDs at all. Out of iTunes the disc wouldn’t even make it past the initialization stage and would return a “medium write error.” What are we missing here?
Have you tried different brands/types of media? I recently came across a 50-pack of CDRs that were ALL bad, I assume due to a manufacturing defect, so it is possible that the media is bad, especially considering it reads fine. If you’ve tried burning different types and brands of media and it still doesn’t work, there’s not much to say but that the drive is probably bad. It may be worth trying to burn at a slower speed, but then again it doesn’t make sense that iTunes would be giving you problems. A lack of RAM can lead to burning problems, but you’ve got a MacBook, so I assume you’ve got at least 512MB, which should be enough to burn out of iTunes. I’d also try burning out of another application such as Toast, or even in the Finder, just to verify it’s not any one application.
