G4 Cube optical drive troubles

[beachycove]

I stripped down my G4 Cube tonight in order to do a couple of small items of maintenance:

1. I wanted to install a splitter on the optical drive power line to run a cooling fan (there's a dual 500MHz G4 in the thing)

2. I wanted to try to fix the optical drive, which could not eject disks (it tried but was not physically able to do it).

I figured that there would be rollers or some such that had gone hard, but discovered instead that there is a small belt driving the eject mechanism, and this was getting pretty dry after a decade in the Cube. I keep a magic compound around called "Rubber Renue" for printer rollers and such, and it really does help to restore old rubber and make it a great deal more sticky, which is what you want in a drive belt—short of sourcing a new one.

Anyway, this worked a treat as the drive now ejects disks fine. It just won't read them any more; it tries to spin, gives up after a split second, and spits the CD out.

Any idea what I may have done and suggestions as to how to fix it?

 

[racepres]

Seems obvious, but, Did you get some "rubber renue" onto the "eye" ?

RP

 

[beachycove]

No, that was done in another location. You also just rub it on with a cloth rather than slosh it around.

But the eye had occurred to me as well. Maybe a simple clean will resolve it.

 

[beachycove]

Cleaned it. Helped a bit, but still flaky. I guess I'll need a new optical drive for the Cube in due course....

 

[mcdermd]

You shouldn't need a splitter. The Cube has fan power pins on the DC board and a bracket for a 80mm fan sitting there, unused. I installed a fan when I put a dual 500MHz G4 processor board from a Gigabit Ethernet in my brother's Cube.

 

[beachycove]

Thanks for the tip. The dual G4 makes a huge change.

I looked into all this also. The trouble with installing the built-in base fan, in my view, is that the fan can cool the processor and hard drive just fine, but it can do little for the graphics card, which is in an area almost completely sealed off from where the base fan goes. I suppose that there might be a generic vacuum effect with the internal fan, so that more air goes up into the area that graphics card occupies, but I prefer to take a more direct approach.

With the fan located beneath the Cube and external to it, and with the Cube raised up so that air can get in from all around, the cooling is much improved, as air is forced up through the holes in the entire base rather than just through the central part of it. I am also able to use a larger fan than could physically be installed internally. The fanspeed is also easily adjustable, though in general I run it at a slowish speed, so that the noise is almost imperceptible.

That's my story, at least, and I am sticking to it. I have already had one Radeon 7500 fry in an uncooled, otherwise stock Cube, and I don't want another one to go bad on me.

 

[techknight]

Sounds like your optical pickup unit took a vacation with a one way ticket. This happened to my tibook g4. same issue. reads CDs real well though. DVDs, forgetaboutit.

 

[beachycove]

Thanks for that last one, which led to some googling.... Are there adjustment pots in these units, does anyone know?