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CD Drive on G4 PowerBook Help

S

slac11

macrumors newbie
Original poster
I have a 500mhz G4 Powerbook. When I put a CD in the drive it spits it back out after a couple of seconds. It does this with every CD I try. What can I do about this?

Thanks
 
slac11 said:
I have a 500mhz G4 Powerbook. When I put a CD in the drive it spits it back out after a couple of seconds. It does this with every CD I try. What can I do about this?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Do you have the model with a combo drive (cd burner?). This was a common problem with the early G4 powerbooks. If you talk to apple and make very angry noises they should fix it even though you're out of warranty.
 
grabberslasher said:
Do you have the model with a combo drive (cd burner?). This was a common problem with the early G4 powerbooks. If you talk to apple and make very angry noises they should fix it even though you're out of warranty.
Click to expand...

Its not a combo drive.
 
slac11 said:
Its not a combo drive.
Click to expand...

Try booting from your hardware test disc. If it boots then that means it's OS X ejecting your disk. Otherwise - go back to Apple. My Powerbook (800Mhz) has the same problem - but only for some CDs and all blank cds.
 
Anyone have any links?

I think I may be seeing the symptoms of this problem on my (oldish) TiBook.

It still works most of the time, but is now frequently refusing disks (blanks, audio CDs, DVDs and data CDs) that work on other computers. Its a 667MHz 15" TiBook with a combodrive. I suspect it's either dirty or something needs adjusting/replacing. But if there's anything I might be able to do (or even diagnostics I could do to determine exactly what the problem is) I'd really love to hear about it.

Cheers
 
Maybe I should sell it

I'm thinking about just selling is PowerBook instead of investing any money into it. Anybody know what kind of money this machine would bring with this possibly broken CD drive? And where is the best place to sell
 
Check eBay

Good place to start - search on your model name, and track a few sales until they are finished to see what price they bring.

I would try to get the DVD issue resolved if you want top dollar, even if it's repalcing it with a cheap, used DVD. I'd imagine that the price of a unit with a broken drive would be a lot less than the cost of replacing the DVD.

But if your time is valuable, let someone else do the repairs, of course, and move on to some NICE new Mac laptops!
 
Apple doesn't acknowledge "known issue"

grabberslasher said:
Do you have the model with a combo drive (cd burner?). This was a common problem with the early G4 powerbooks. If you talk to apple and make very angry noises they should fix it even though you're out of warranty.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, the same thing just happened with my 18-month-old PowerBook G4. I called Apple support and they said they had received no complaints and therefore it isn't considered a "known issue" and worthy of repair. Shoot. Apparently in order for it to be a known issue, hundreds of thousands of people need to contact them? I was told the drive was manufactured by Pioneer. Don't know what else to do but fork out a couple hundred bucks for a new drive or repair of the old one!
 
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