Problems opening the optical drive

[quinterro]

I have a Blue/White G3 that I'm trying to reinstall MacOS X on and am having problems ejecting the tray on it. I've tried a DVD drive from a PowerMac G4, which was spotty on this one but worked fine on the G4 it was in originally. I now have an NEC CD-ROM drive in it but pressing the eject button does nothing. Currently the drive cover is off to see if that was the issue, but apparently it isn't.

It has worked in the past - otherwise I would not have been able to install 10.3/10.4 on it.

Any ideas?

 

[quinterro]

When the data cable is not connected it ejects just fine.

 

[Metalchic]

sounds like either the logic borad orthe cable's fault. i had 2 of those iMac cables fail on me (one bursyt into flames :S:S)

 

[quinterro]

Found the problem. The red wire was frayed by the drive cage.

With another cable (nowhere near as long as the original) it worked fine.

Grrrr....

 

[Metalchic]

Found the problem. The red wire was frayed by the drive cage.
With another cable (nowhere near as long as the original) it worked fine.

Grrrr....

haha thats what i thought, you should replace it with a third party made cable instaid of the one that comes with the imac to prevent a repeat of the problem.

 

[quinterro]

Found the problem. The red wire was frayed by the drive cage.
With another cable (nowhere near as long as the original) it worked fine.

Grrrr....

haha thats what i thought, you should replace it with a third party made cable instaid of the one that comes with the imac to prevent a repeat of the problem.

This is not an iMac, but a Blue and White G3 tower running at 400mhz. I needed to backup the data before I reinstalled Tiger, so I removed the DVD drive and connected a 30GB hard disk to the cable. Apparently it partially lifted up the data cable so when I slid the cage back in it caught on the cable.

The one used on the optical drive on this one is considerably longer than normal IDE cables and snakes around the inside of the case, under the hard drive try and finally connects to the motherboard. It's going to be a PITA to replace.

 

[SiliconValleyPirate]

Might serve to find out where it had chaffed and stick a couple of layers of tape over it to protect it.

The red wire IIRC is the 'unit ready' line. A 'low' signal (i.e. the line is 'off') indicates the unit is at the ready state. I don't know how this affects tray locking on CD drives, however. I'd probably put a bet on that the wire was grounding to the chassis and staying 'high' (i.e. 'not ready') which was locking the drive as the computer was probably polling it.

 

[quinterro]

I will check to see if there is any remnant left of line 1 and cover it with electrical tape when I get back to work.

I did manage to get Tiger back on it with the side open this afternoon. Now I get to copy 12GB of music files back to it and set it up for web development again.. Woohoo!

 

[quinterro]

The electrical tape fixed it. The wire from line 1 was making contact with the chassis.