Using Toshiba XM3301B scsi cdrom on old MACs...help?

Hi Claude, Heh. You have come up against a great MacOS / hardware annoyance. First thing you need to know, is that support for non-Apple CD-ROM drives is (criminally?) poor in versions of MacOS prior to 7.6; things seemed to get a little better after the introduction of 7.6. Your problems are very typical, so don't feel too badly. If you were using a "Genuine Apple" CD drive, (with blessed firmware) this would all be easier. This is very similar to the situation with the "Apple HD/SC Setup", which also handily ignores hard drives with non-Apple firmware. This further supports my assertion that we are all quite lucky that it's Bill Gates, and not Steve Jobs who is the de-facto dictator of the micro computing world - but I digress. Have you tried an HFS CD-ROM in the XM3301 drive? I suspect you will find that the driver will mount an HFS CD - support for ISO9660 filesystems was another weak point in this era, for both Apple and non-Apple drives. On the other hand, I have had two of the NEC Multi-Spin (3X and 6X) drives, which perfectly handle both HFS and ISO9660 using the proprietary NEC driver (which incidentally, does not see drives from other manufacturers). Also, there is an excellent generic CD-ROM driver for Mac, known as "Sunrise CD" which supports just about any CD drive, but it does NOT support the ISO9660 filesystem. It's clear from your experiment with the Pioneer drive, that neither the OS nor the hardware is broken - I am laying this one at the feet of Apple, who seem to have made a conscious effort to exclude third party hardware from the Mac realm, with some measure of success. My suggestions: get a Genuine Apple CD drive, use a third-party drive with a working proprietary driver (such as Pioneer or NEC) upgrade to OS 7.6 or later, or just keep shooting craps; YMMV. Bill Layer Sales Technician &lt;b.layer(a)vikingelectronics.com&gt; +----------------------------------+ Viking Electronics, Inc. 1531 Industrial St. Hudson, WI. 54016 - U.S.A 715.386.8861 ext. 210 <http://www.vikingelectronics.com> +----------------------------------+ "Telecom Solutions for the 21st Century"