To set this up- I am teaching a class inside a prison. A handful of years ago we donated in 3, brand new 21.5 inch Mac 2.3GHz dual-core 7th-generation Intel Core i5 processor desktop computers running macOS Sierra 10.12.6. Since that time there have been no updates done to the computers mostly because there is no internet inside prison! So no substantial changes have been made. The primary function of the computers is to run the audio program ProTools which had to be installed completely from CD.

Flash forward - one of the computers has stopped responding to our external CD burners. We have a few of them. It sees the burner. It can pull info off a disk and onto the computer. However, it cannot burn new info onto a disk. (error code: 0x80020061)

There shouldn't be anything different about this computer.* All the burners work with all the other computers. All the computers have over 700G of memory open.

Any solution I try is going to be complicated as there is:

1. No internet
2. I cannot bring in a newer drive without going through a lengthy donation process in the prison system
3. Any driver updates I want to try will be complicated as well - involving getting approval of all the files, having them sent in on a server and transferred to a disk which I can then attempt to upload.

My best guess is that some file, somehow, became corrupted. Or someone accidentally deleted something important?

The next time I visit the prison I plan to:

-try multiple brands of discs (we have a few in there)

-Force a restart of the finder

What else? The more things I can try at once the merrier. Oh, and just to make it more complicated - since nothing has updated for the past 4 (?) years, I'm scared to do an update of the OS for fear that our ancient version of ProTools then won't work. But maybe I could just do a fresh upload of the original OS?

Please help! You'll be doing a service for our little program and the few incarcerated people that it really matters to. Thank you!

*EDIT- There *shouldn't* be anything different about the computer, however apparently the prison investigations unit once combed through all the computers and now memory serves that it was around this time that the external burner stopped working. It seems highly likely that something was inadvertently deleted.