I've recently acquired a Bondi blue iMac (Rev A, G3/233 chipped to 300, 160MB RAM, 4GB HDD, and a blasted 24x CD-ROM). Currently it runs OS 8.6, but I want to throw OS X Panther on it. Problem is, the CD-ROM is acting up. It refuses to recognize the Panther install discs, along with almost any other discs I throw at it. Has no trouble taking Audio CDs though, although it cannot play the first track properly on any of them.
When I pop in any given CD, it does any of the following things:
1) Spins up to a low speed, I can hear clicks of various intensity inside the drive (not very loud though, regular-sounding drive clicks), then quickly spins down, with OS 8.6 telling me it wants to initialize the disk, reporting it as "Macintosh HFS, 0K". I can choose two other options where it reports the size, but I obviously can't initialize it, since it's not a burner.
2) Spins up to a low speed, pauses, then spins up to a high speed. I can hear a few clicks and movement, it's not as loud as in the previous "level". This level usually takes a bit of time, up to a minute, as it presumably tries to read the CD. It then fails, and gives me the initialization dialog, but this time, instead of reporting 0K, it reports the size of the burned session, in MB (so 645.2MB, for example).
3) (I've only gotten it to do this about 5-6 times, by repeatedly re-inserting the CD upon ejection) Spins up to a low speed, pauses, high speed, and then immediately either to a low speed, or complete stop (I can't tell by hearing alone). This is when it recognizes the CD.
At step 3, I clicked the OS X installer, it failed to select itself for booting (error -2), but I switched it manually in the Startup Disk control panel. Upon reboot, it's a chance thing. I've gotten it to boot the Panther disk, only to freeze at the Apple logo, presumably due to a read error. I've gotten as far as the Disk Utility (to partition, or more likely, erase my 4GB drive, since there isn't really much to partition); that, however, froze as well, once again due to a read error, with OS X's wonderful coloured ball spinning away endlessly.
Upon the suggestion of a friend, I've taken the bottom portion of the CD-ROM tray off (as to have access to the bottom of the laser assembly), and attempted tweaking the one of two screws on the entire assembly (the one located almost directly beneath the laser). I made 1/4 turns in one direction, reaching about 3 turns, then did the same in the other. I've never gotten past level 2 by doing this.
Realizing that getting this drive working may be a hopeless enterprise, I took the Mac apart to see if I could hook up a regular PC drive (got plenty of those lying around). Of course, the Mac's connector is 100-pin from what I can tell, as it converts the 100-pin mobo connector to a laptop-drive connector. As soon as I saw that, I thought to give my laptop's CD drive a try. So I did.
Here, I was faced with another dilemma. Once OS 8.6 booted, it saw the drive and instantly recognized and read every CD I threw in (so it's definitely the Mac drive that's the problem). However... Open Firmware refuses to recognize the drive. I zapped the PRAM, I did a reset-nvram and reset-all, to no avail. OF just skipped past the drive, without even trying to boot off it (I was holding down C of course, it wouldn't take it even by regular means). In OF, doing a dir cd
illicited an error (I forgot what it was, but it was something indicating the device is simply not there, not connected, physically inexistent).
Upon the suggestion of the aforementioned friend, I came here to ask for advice. Is there any way to get OF to somehow take my laptop's drive? Is there any way to repair the Mac's original drive?
Thx in advance.
P.S. One thing I haven't tried is hooking up a regular IDE CD along with the Mac's HD... think that might work? Should I put the CD master and HD slave? Or the other way around?
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