Using a PowerMac G3 running OS 9.2, purchased at a moving sale in my neighborhood, I get an error message "Disk locked" when I try to use the cd drive to transfer some old files to cd and free up space on my hard disk.

Trying to use the help file, I concluded that computer security was involved, using the Keychain security option.

There is a keychain file, but. since I don't know the original owner's password, I can't open the keychain file and unlock the disk.

Actually, I don't understand how this cd can be locked, since it is a blank cd, with no identifying label; the error message comes after I respond to a prompt asking if I want to initialize the disk.

I have tried both RW and W only CDs(several of each).

I tried removing the keychain file, thinking that without a keychain security file there would be no security monitoring by the operating system, but this didn't work.

1. The keychain may contain passwords used by the previous owner. It should be easy to disable the keychain feature by dragging the related extensions and/or control panels out of the System Folder and restarting the machine.

But I doubt that the keychain has anything to do with not being able to burn files to a blank CD.

2. How do you try to burn files to the CD? Which application do you use to do that? It is a long time since I used a real OS9 machine and I forgot how it worked there. But if you try to drag files to the CD icon, that is probably not the way to do it.

Hi,

My first question would be whether that G3 has a CD/DVD writer installed? Do you know the specs of the machine?

EDIT: Oops

Best,
Cat_7

Cat_7 is right. I checked with Mactracker and it appears that, in standard configuration, all PowerMac G3 machines can only read CDs and DVDs.

You might be able to add in a USB card (PCI) and then just transfer everything to a high-capacity USB stick (thumb drive).

This $10 USB PCI add-on card might do the trick...
http://www.frys.com/product/3715166?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

... at least it'd be cheaper than getting an internal SCSI CDR/RW drive...

_________________
My Setup:

• iMac G3/600 (Summer 2001; DVD-ROM)
• 1 GB RAM
• 80 GB HDD
• Ethernet (wired)
• MintPPC 11 (config file used: http://mac.linux.be/files/xorg/imac10.txt) with XFCE4; instead of the default LXDE.

I never get to the stage of
trying to write to a CD in the
CD-ROM drive, because when
I put a new, blank CD in the
drawer the system says that
the CD must be initialized first, gives me a choice of PRODOS, and then after accepting this option I get the message "Disk locked".

If it helps, the Apple System
Profiler yields the following info:

Driver
version 1.4.7

Vendor Matshita

Revision # ZS20

Product ID CD-ROM CR-585

Apple disc
burning Supported

The Apple System Profiler yields
the following info:

Driver
version 1.4.7

Vendor Matshita

Revision # ZS20

Product ID CD-ROM CR-585

Apple disc
burning Supported

This sounds like technical
overkill to my admittedly limited knowledge of CD-Rom
drives and associated software in general, and Apple in particular.

Checking out a number of
hits of my error message on
Google, the impression I got
was that it was more
common and poorly
understood than I had
thought it could be, both on
Apple and PC systems.

Since the error message makes no sense for a blank,
uninitialized CD, I suspect
that it is an example of poor
error-handling by the system
when some system software
programmer was lazy or
incompetent and chose this
error message as a catch-all
response to (probably several) problem(s) that could occur.

Yes,

That message is correct from the point of view of disk initialization routines, but the system report seems bogus.

Please look here:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/12 ... 0&tstart=0
Verdict: your drive can't write cd's.

When a disk is inserted the Mac OS assumes it is empty and wants to initialize it, like it would suggest to initialize any other disk you add to your machine that was not initialized before.

Best,
cat_7