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iMac G4 won't eject CD/DVD drive!
Posted by: twillkickers on 2019-09-01 07:36:50
Picked up the top of the line 1.25 GHz iMac G4 from the junkyard, and everything on it was working except for the CD/DVD drive. When I pressed the eject button on the keyboard, nothing happened. In addition, I went to the command line mode on bootup (CMD+OPTION+O+F) and then typed in "eject cd". The command line responded "CAN'T open the EJECT device." I cracked open the iMac, cleaned out the case and everything, and replaced the CD/DVD drive with a CD/DVD drive from a less powerful iMac G4 (that I knew was working) and turned on the machine. Everything booted up OK, but once again I cannot eject the new CD drive. What the heck!? Does anyone know what might be going on here?

Posted by: twillkickers on 2019-09-01 11:18:39
So I took it apart again, and swapped the IDE cable with the one from the other iMac, and everything worked. So I'm not sure if the IDE cable is specific to that drive, or if I was just dealing with a bad IDE cable in the first place.

Posted by: jimjimx on 2019-09-03 00:47:54
You can also try holding the mouse button at time of boot, and that should eject the disk. 

Posted by: jamie marchant on 2019-10-20 10:26:38
It could be the IDE cable I would think it would be the drive's power cable. Is they a manual eject?

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