CD-R with external CDROM drive 1969-010

[rkawakami]

I received a 1969-010 external CDROM drive (PCMCIA interface) a couple of months ago and as it was missing the AC adapter, could not fully check it out. Having bought the proper power supply for $11 on eBay this past week and fully charged the Ni-Cad battery pack, it seems to work okay, but only for pressed CDROMs. It does not appear to recognize any CD-R (recordable) disks that I have. Does this seem correct? The drive has a manufacturing date of March 1998 so I would have thought that it could at least read a CD-R but probably not a CD-RW. I've checked the IBM/Lenovo sites for information about this drive but there's not much available. Does anyone know if this thing inherently cannot read CD-Rs and if so, would a firmware upgrade (if available) allow this dinosaur to read them?

My understanding is that this drive was used on 560 systems and the like. I've read all four threads here concerning the 1969-010 drive and none of them mention anything about this limitation.