# Busted CD drive in iMac, any quick/temp fixes?



## caroljude (Oct 15, 2004)

(Apologies in advance if this should really be in one of the Hardware forums, but as it's Mac-related I thought I'd have a better chance getting a hand over here.)

I have a revision B iMac on 'permanent loan' from a friend. It has a hardware problem that prevents me from upgrading the firmware (I'm running OS 8.5!) but has served me fine for the last few years. It has a tray-loading CD drive. I don't use the drive very often, pretty much only to play games once in a while. The other evening I was playing a quite graphically unsophisticated game and started experiencing long pauses during which the cursor showed as a clockface. At the same time I heard clicking/tapping noises from the drive caused by the spin of the CDR. I quit the game and ejected the disk, cleaned it and restarted. 

Ever since then I cannot get a CD to show on the desktop - I get the 'CD cannot be read, do you want to initialize?' error message and the pull-down menu below reads "Pro-Dos OK" (if I remember correctly.) I tried a number of disks and a number of 'techniques' in inserting them (slowly/gently, more forcefully/faster, etc) but none will be read, including my emergency boot disk/Norton tools. Disk First Aid shows the drive when the CD is in (I start the application before the error message comes on the screen) and says there is a problem with the drive but it cannot fix it.

Obviously, there's a hardware problem with the drive, and I'm wondering if anyone's experienced the same thing and has been able to render a temporary fix until they can get more permanent help for it, sort of like wedging a matchbook under an uneven table leg... (Maybe I should even try doing that!)

As this is a Revision B I don't really want to dump a lot of money into having it fixed but cannot afford a new computer right now (or spring for an adaptor for my old dusty SCSI external CD burner so I can use that as a replacement.) I'm hoping someone out there has taken these apart and recognizes what the problem is and can tell me whether it's inexpensively fixable (even temporarily) or not. I know if it's the laser then it's toast, but maybe it's something else?

Thanks in advance!


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