Oh the frustration

I haven't shut my iMac down for so long that I'd forgotten where the power button was.

It all began with the harddisk running out of space thanks to heavy photo activity. While trying back up the photos from my cousin's ROM yesterday, I killed no less than six DVD-Rs and one DVD+R, all of which failed to write properly.

The error codes and messages returned were varied - bad media, verification failure, tracking servo failure. And the last one implied some kind of hardware problem. Some frantic searching suggested that drive overheating could be the culprit, quite likely given that the iMac is almost never off.

So I shut it down for a couple of hours' break this afternoon, and am now attempting the backup again. So far so good - the DVD-R is already in the verification stage. Hopefully it doesn't bail out like earlier.

Now I'm really tempted to invest in a good external firewire DVD writer.