iMac eats my CD's

September 29, 2009 7:47 PM

Pseudo broken iMac and boot camp issues: replaced old failing hard drive, and cd-drive subsequently breaks, among other things

The computer in question is a 20-inch iMac aluminum 2ghz processor.

I successfully clean-installed snow leopard after formatting the new drive, but the disc refused to come out. After trying everything, I opened up the drive and removed the disc manually.

Windows (be it vista, or 7 beta) refuses to install on the boot camp partition using an external HDD that I imaged, or an external DVD drive. Once I restart so that the installation can begin, it hangs forever at the gray screen.

I also tried installing rEFIt: it allows me to select the DVD, begin to boot from it, and then hangs forever (before the disc even loads), and disallows me from trying to boot from an external HDD.

What should I try next?

posted by sindas to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Rip the disc to an image, restore that image to a USB flash drive, and boot from that? (You can do this all in Disk Utility).
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism at 8:43 PM on September 29

Buy an external DVD drive. Firewire is the slightly better choice over USB as not all older macs can boot from USB, but they would have to be pretty old at this point.

Is it possible you didn't quite get the reassembly correct? I have not taken apart an iMac but if it's anything like the designs of the laptops, I can easily see a slightly askew reassembly screwing up the optical drive.
posted by chairface at 8:51 PM on September 29

USB booting refuses to work through rEFIt or otherwise. Seems like I have one of the iMac models that loves to not let you boot a legacy OS without a superdrive... External DVD drives refuse to work as well.
posted by sindas at 9:05 AM on September 30