eMac Combo Drive R.I.P. - What next?

[Soton Speed]

What luck, having just purchased Tiger and sorted myself out to make the upgrade, the optical drive has decided to give up the ghost.

The drive has being playing up for a long time now - being very picky about which disks (DVD) it reads and mounts. At the moment, from a Finder window I can see that the Tiger upgrade DVD has been recognised but when I try to open it, Finder crashes. From this, I have deduced that the drive is well and truely buggered - correct? Previous to this I had repaired permissions rebooted and zapped P-RAM. Now all disks (CD & DVD) are not mountable.

My options 'matrix' is now a new drive - internal/external and combo/super - I take it that Apple won't replace the drive as it is now 4 years old?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

[gman71882]

ive had a similar problem with my Tibook superdrive - Apple replaced it last aug '05 under applecare but my warranty finished in Feb and the replacement just died... gotta find a new one.

On the upside... a replacement superdrive @ Macsales.com is only 54.99
which isnt a bad deal @ all!!.
And if you feel up to it, replacing it yourself isnt THAT hard.
I work at a university and we have a whole lab of 1 GHZ eMac's; I just had to replace a hard drive in one of them. It was a cumbersome task but i followed the service manual for the emac very closely and everything went great.
The Optical drive is actually ALOT easier to replace than the Hard Drive because of the placement of the parts. HD took about a hour, whereas i could have replaced the optical drive in about 30min.
The architecture in your model emac may be different so the take apart procedure could be differnent as a result: Might be longer.

Service manuals are not that hard to come by: check HERE for your emac version or just google search for "apple emac take apart manual".

I have the service manual for the Emac w/ ATI graphics: came out around fall 2003. & the first Emac. Personal Message me if you need it.

Your other option would be to just get an enclosure and put the replacement Drive in that... easier in the short term, but it costs more cause youll have to buy the Enclosure. (i would recommend a Firewire box if you do this). Can get one from New Egg, Macsales.com, CompUSA, BEST Buy. etc... Anywhere.

good luck

 

[Soton Speed]

PM sent 21:49GMT 04/04/06.