Installing Superdrive on an eMac G4

[luke15rl]

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice with regard to DVD burner hardware. I recently purchased a 1.25 GHz eMac G4 that came with a combo rather than a superdrive. I have been meaning to upgrade from panther to leopard in the past few days, and predictably ran into a roadblock with regard to the requirement to read dual layer dvds. I have considered purchasing a superdrive on ebay and attempting to install it myself, but I have quite limited knowledge with such procedures and, considering this is my first mac, I am reluctant to undergo such a risky endeavor. As a side note, I had also considered going with an external burner or borrowing one from someone, but upon reading more in this direction, it seems that it's difficult to find a solid combination of mac compatibility, good specs, and reliability. Any feedback on the best route to take would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[CubeHacker]

A combo drive should be able to read any DVD's - including dual layer DVD's just fine. It can't burn them, but it can read them. If its not reading your DVD's, then the drive may be defective.

Luckily, replacing the optical drive in the eMac is probably one of the easiest things to do, with the hard drive being one of the most difficult. Any DVD-RW drive will work, but only some will be recognized natively by OSX for burning. Toast will still burn fine, but you won't be able to burn from the finder or iTunes/iDVD, etc. I believe xlr8yourmac.com has a good list of drives that work with osx natively.

As for the installation instructions, you can find it here: http://home.earthlink.net/~strahm_s/manuals.html

If your emac is one of the newer ones, then its going to be the eMac (ATI Graphics) pdf. If its with an Nvidia chip then its the older eMac.

 

[luke15rl]

Thanks

By the way, as belated as it may be, I'd like to thank you for your help. With your information, I am well on my way to putting in a superdrive. Although, I am a bit anxious about my ability to successfully perform a CRT discharge.