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All CD-Rom drives in my iMacs RevA are broken

tecneeq

Well-known member
Is there some special secret why they all are broken? Maybe something i can fix?

And if not, what model do i get for replacement?

 

uniserver

Well-known member
I think people just burnt them out listening to cd's in them over and over.

that is my thought.

chances are i have some for you, did you need 3?

just pm me your $budget, and city/country, I should be able to wrestle up a final price for you.

 

tecneeq

Well-known member
Shipping would be to germany, makes no sense, but thanks for the kind offer. [:D] ]'>

The drives are standard 24x laptop drives, as far as i can see. The faceplate might be changeable, if i find the right maker and model.

 

Byrd

Well-known member
The optical drives in Rev A iMacs have always been pretty flaky. They are not standard ATAPI IDE optical drives found in laptops - the casing is different and the ATAPI to IDE bridgeboard is Apple specific (if you use a generic ATAPI to IDE connector it sticks out the side, making it useless). You could potentially hack a laptop optical drive but it would need a custom harness to fit and the Apple bridgeboard may not fit properly. So easier to find a proper iMac drive and replace - go for a DVD drive which seems a little more reliable.

See here for example:

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Apple-iMac-24X-CD-ROM-Drive-Slot-Load-350-400-500-600-700-IDE-ATAPI-CR-1760-J-/251030778745?pt=US_CD_DVD_Blu_Ray_Drives&hash=item3a7299b379&_uhb=1#ht_500wt_1156

 

MacJunky

Well-known member
The drives in the Rev A-D iMacs and in the Lombard&Pismo are just plain crap. That is the secret to why they are all broken; not because of any usage patterns.

Just garbage. Replace it

Byrd, that is a slotloading optical drive, not one from a trayloader. the slotloaders in the later iMacs and TiBooks and stuff IIRC were different than the trayloaders used in the rev A-D iMacs and Lombard/PDQ.

And the Wallstreet.. not even going there.

 
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uniserver

Well-known member
I sware back in 06 i bought a standard TEAC Laptop 24x drive, and bolted right to the apple adaptor.

Installed it and everything, it just looked a little funny with the black face plate.

Ah i remember now… The only drive that would work was the one with the MS/SL/CS switch on it, because it had to be set as slave, a Cable Select cdrom with no way to change it would not work.

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
If you were *really* desperate it would be technically possible, *if* the stock bridge board didn't work with a given laptop drive, to use a "generic" Laptop ATAPI->IDE bridge board instead, but you'd have to do one of two things:

A: Install a longer 40 pin cable with a second connector on it between the hard drive and the motherboard and run the laptop drive as a slave. Some of those bridge boards have a master/slave jumper on them. Alternatively you could use an 80 pin CS cable. (Pretty sure I had that work. Granted it's been a long time.) However, I'm not 100% sure this would be a bootable solution.

(I've run a desktop DVD-ROM drive as a slave on the "main" IDE bus on a disembodied iMac motherboard before, but I can't for the life of me remember if I ever booted it.)

B: In theory you could convert the fine-pitch 50 pin connector that the stock bridgeboard uses into generic 40 pin IDE and wire up a generic bridgeboard that way. (The cable's standard IDE for the first 40 pins, then it has the audio and power leads.) People were doing that back in the 2000-aughts when it was still fashionable to repackage iMac guts into desktop cases. (Well, maybe "fashionable" is the wrong word. Back when "the resulting computer was arguably worth the effort", maybe.)

 

tecneeq

Well-known member
By bridgeboard you mean the board between the JAE 50 pin of the drive and the larger 44/50 pin that goes to the motherboard (through the metalring)? JAE 50 is the common connector in laptops, it's basically 40 pin ATA (1 to 40), 4 pin power (41 to 44) and 6 pin option pins (A to F), in this case they are used for sound and reset IMHO. Pretty common.

The problem is the faceplate. The button and pin-hole are centered, but most available drives have them at the right. The pin-hole i can do without, but the button i need. And can i simply stick or glue the faceplate to another drive? Will it hold? Will the vapor from the glue slowly destroy the drive? 8-o

As for IDE master/slave on the harddisk bus, i didn't have much luck with that, cable select seemed to work. Since the RevA iMac will not boot from any USB device and i only had a big single partition on the drive, i had to get inventive to cleanly install Mac OS 9.2 in german. Installed was an old and badly maintained version of 9.0 in danish language. I plugged in a long 40 pin cable with two ends and let it out through the CD hole. There i connected the original drive (didn't change it's jumper, which was set to a configuration not reserved or documented according to WDs PDF). I added another 6GB IDE drive and jumpered it as slave. Didn't work. I jumpered it to cable select, that worked.

I also had to provide external power to the drives, which wasn't as easy as it sounds. I had to take apart two very old external SCSI drives to get power. I hope you can imagine how my table looked like and how it sounded if all was plugged in. Think jet engine. :cool:

However, it turned out the MacOS9 would only create a single partition on the new drive. Which meant if i ever wanted to install something new/different, i would need either a new cd rom drive, or take it all apart and add the second drive again. So, how do you partition a drive with Mac OS 9? I have no idea.

I had an old installation of OSX 10.1 on another disk, so i booted that and made my partitions. Now i have a clean Mac OS 9.2 in german on the fist filesystem and another empty filesystem i can work with. :-*

Long story short, broken cd-rom drives suck. :approve:

 

tecneeq

Well-known member
I have to correct myself, like uniserver said, the settings for master/slave have to be set correctly, cableselect doesn't seem to work.

Also it appears that one of the three iMac cd drives is able to play audio cds. Alas, it doesn't boot anything.

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
Of the three trayloader drives in the three iMac jawbones I have here, one will not read a particular type of CD-R, one will not read another type. The one in the iMac G3 seems to split the difference.

The fruitBooks use the same trayloader and it has some of the same balkiness.

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
To second ChasC, it's actually getting pretty hard to find burnable media that works reliably in drives of that vintage. If your OS CDs are burned copies, well, the drives might actually work fine. (Okay, maybe the one that reads audio CDs works fine.) Have you tried with real "pressed" CDs?

Seriously, the problem is getting so bad is that the last three times I've messed with NetBSD on my old Sun boxes I've ended up biting the bullet and setting up a netinstall server to get things going because of problems with burned CDs. Had to go with Netinstall to get Debian on an old 1997 vintage lunchbox PC as well, its laptop-sized CD-ROM drive was completely useless for anything modern. (With funky and borked BIOS support the icing on the cake.)

By bridgeboard you mean the board between the JAE 50 pin of the drive and the larger 44/50 pin that goes to the motherboard (through the metalring)? JAE 50 is the common connector in laptops, it's basically 40 pin ATA (1 to 40), 4 pin power (41 to 44) and 6 pin option pins (A to F), in this case they are used for sound and reset IMHO. Pretty common.
Yes, JAE 50 is common. The 50 pin ribbon cable that goes from the JAE-50 adapter board to the motherboard in the Mac is *not*, that's what I was referring to. (It is of course easy to find JAE-50 to 40 pin desktop IDE adapter boards, so I was describing a possible situation where you couldn't get a laptop drive to work with Apple's adapter board and cabling but it *would* work with a generic adapter.)

 

tecneeq

Well-known member
Right, the 50 pin cable is unusual.

I tried both, handmade and a bunch of pressed osx cds. Both did, if i remember correctly, work at some point. Well, i'll keep my eyes peeled for any kind of tray loading laptop drives. Maybe i find one fitting to the frontplate somehow.

 

Macdrone

Well-known member
The drive I remember is the same that is on the cube and if you go to cubeowner web site I put a standard ide laptop drive in mine with adapter board and power cord. with 1 pin removed on the board its forced to be slave.

 
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