May I apologize first of all for being so slow in responding to your prompt and helpful post, BDAqua? Seminars, meetings and lectures intervened. This question partly duplicates an unanswered question of mine in the eMac community, for which I apologize, but it may get noticed better here.

I should be very grateful for any suggestions. I have confirmed that the LaCie d2 drive is compatible with a PPC processor and with OS X 10.3.9 or above. But it has occurred to me that somehow the DVD Player and iTunes are trying to access the 'dead' internal drive rather than the external one or perhaps the presence of the wrecked Pioneer firmware is somehow blocking access t the external drive. I still have the built-in Pioneer superdrive, but this began to fail and after one succesful upgrade of its firmware (using DVRFlash) which did not cure the problems, a further update went wrong and it is now permanently stuck in 'kernel' mode and is imoperative. I would prefer to be able to use the Apple DVD Player because of its better options and controls. But the strange thing is that VLC (an open-source application for reading websites and all sorts of media) does recognize the DVD and will play it.

If I start iTunes, it does not show anything at all. When an inserted video DVD shows up on the desktop and I start the DVD Player, an error message appears: 'There was an initialization error.

I have connected a LaCie d2 DVD drive to the FireWire port of my computer (and I have also tried the USB connection).

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