Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Can't eject disk iMac G4

S

Sepultura

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 10, 2013
157
1
What a nightmare... First the Powerbook, now the iMac.

I swapped the dead hard drive in my iMac G4 for it's original 60GB drive which I confirmed works. Turned the computer back and got the Mac ? flashing which indicates no operating system installed. I tried to open the CD tray to put in Tiger but it wouldn't open...

This is what I tried

- Eject button
- Command E
- Hold down Mouse
- Open firmware eject CD - gives message "can't OPEN the EJECT device"
- SMC reset

I took the base off and confirmed no cables on the optical drive were lose.

Last time I had the optical drive open I had disk warrior running to confirm the hard drive was dead. I am pretty sure the disk warrior disk ejected no problem, so the tray should be empty.
 
Daniël Oosterhuis said:
The jumpers were set correctly, right?
Click to expand...
Yeah I just noticed this not long after I posted.

The optical drive had the jumper 3 over which I believe is Master - it's been so long. I moved it on over and then the optical drive opened on boot. That said, it didn't recognize any CD or DVD's I put in... Tiger disk or DiskWarrior.

I took the whole thing apart again and the 60GB hard drive had a black jumper (that I could barely see) at the very end.

I wonder if should just do Cable Select. First jumper on each.
 
Nermal said:
I believe that Cable Select is the preferred jumper position for all OS X-capable machines.
Click to expand...
Yeah I did cable select and now the optical drive is reading CD's. I am running DiskWarrior on the drive and then I am going to try and install Tiger.
[doublepost=1459053670][/doublepost]I ran DiskWarrior and it said it repaired this old 60GB drive (original drive from this computer). I checked the previews in DiskWarrior and I could see files going back to when we got the machine.

I rebooted the G4 hoping it would start in OS X and of course it did NOT. Again I get the flashing ? Mac. So I rebooted and put in the Tiger Disk, nothing happened. I try to launch Tiger disk while holding option, the disk never shows up. The optical drive is just super loud but nothing comes of it.

I connected the iMac G4 to my one WORKING Powerbook G4 through target disk mode. I can see the 60GB and all of it's contents on the desktop. Disk Utility says the volume is OK.

So why won't this thing boot?

The "dead" hard drive, which I took out, was 250GB that would show the Apple logo and gray screen, spinning forever. It would not work in target disk mode.

The "original" hard drive, which I put back in, is 60GB and it shows the flashing ? Mac. It is found in target disk mode.

What do I do now? Get a third drive?
 
Also now the optical drive is opening every time I boot the computer. If I close the tray, it opens again a second later. What the heck is going on here!
 
Anybody have any idea? Is this hard drive going as well? At the moment I am out of working IDE drives so nothing I can do... I really need to get a pata/ide to sata adapter.
 
I'd suggest downloading Smartmontools on a working computer. This will output raw smart values. Please post them or make screenshots so we can see if the drives have bad sectors or are failing otherwise.

You can get it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/.

If running on Windows PC, just download the setup and run it. It will make smartctl available from the command prompt. It can be used with this command: smartctl -a sdX (where X is the letter of the drive, just try them all)

If running Linux open Terminal and type "sudo apt-get install smartmontools". Smartctl will become available from Terminal and can be used with this command: sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX (where X is the letter of the drive, just try them all).

If running on a (PowerPC) Mac follow this:
Download the source version from the above site.
This should give you a .tar.gz archive which you can extract by opening Terminal and typing
tar zxvf smartmontools-6.4.tar.gz

Then you'll have to compile the code by typing these commands in the terminal one by one:

cd smartmontools-6.4
./configure
make
sudo make install

This works on at least OS X 10.4 Tiger and up. It might require Developer tools to be installed, they can be downloaded for free from https://developer.apple.com/downloads/. For Tiger, you'll need Xcode 2.5 developer tools, for Leopard you'll need Xcode 3.1.3 developer tools.

After you have done this,
type:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/disk0s0 (first hard drive)
sudo smartctl -a /dev/disk1s0 (second hard drive etc.)
 
If you didn't try yet, set the pins to Cable Select... I had my cube configured wrong with the HDD on Master and the ODD on CS and the entire machine was slow and buggy, not to mention the ODD wasn't reading the disk. I took out the HDD and set it to CS, and everything worked perfectly and went back to normal. If you can't find the pin config, search the HDD or ODD online for its Pin config
 
There is an extra pin on IDE drives that macs dont use. If its a pc look and pull that pin. Like the cube it will make it non bootable and act funny.

Also did you reapply thermal paste before reassembly?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back