[G4] DVDs not showing up in G4

[Alex]

On May 17, 2005, at 16:54, rich northouse wrote:

> Are these external drives -- USB or FW.  If they are and you didn't 
> have them powered up when you did your system generation, the OS 
> doesn't know they exist!  If the above is true, you need to power them 
> up and re-gen the part of the OS that loads the DVD drivers.

No. Mac OS X does not work like that, and it's not necessary to 
"re-gen" anything when powering up an external device. Essentially, 
hardware attached to the system is tracked by a dynamic database called 
I/O Registry, which is updated whenever a device is added or removed. I 
guess it could become corrupted, but, if it does, the system has to be 
rebooted (the I/O Registry is not stored to disk; rather, it is rebuilt 
on each boot). For details, read the I/O Kit Fundamentals book from the 
developer documentation.


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