A friend of mine's got a Powerbook G4/400 that's having a weird issue with it's DVD-ROM drive. In OSX, if I put a CD in, it wont recognize it. A few days later, I also encountered another OSX problem where it'd hang on bootup on the "Waiting for Network File System" part. It'd take a few minutes to get past that and then get to the blue screen background and hang there for 10 minutes before finally working.
Thinking it was a software issue, I decided to reinstall OSX. So I put the CD in and rebooted holding down C, however the computer just spat the disc back out.
On a whim I decided to boot into OS9 which is on another partition. I put the disc in there and it read it fine! In fact it'll read anything fine. So I put the OSX disc in there and ran the installer program and clicked restart.
The computer booted off the OSX cd and I did an archive and install. When it rebooted, it again hung on "Waiting for Network File System" and when it spat Disc 1 out and asked for Disc 2 to complete the Install, it refused to take it (just like before) and spat it out.
I also tried a couple paltry things like cleaning the system and user caches and repairing permissions. Problem still remains.
The only things I haven't had him try yet are zapping the pram, resetting the power manager, and completely wiping the HD and doing a new install instead of an archive and install.
Does anyone have any ideas? My friends going to drive into town today for me to take a look at it (it's not under warranty anymore or anything), and I was wondering if any of you folk had any other things for me to try or consider before giving up and giving him some bad news.
-vasu
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