I got an Apple iMac on the weekend for cheap, the thing works except it’s cdrom won’t read discs properly. Since the cdrom in an iMac is slimline and integrated it’s not something you can swap out easily. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue but the system had no OS installed on it. I wanted a test OS X machine to test some backup software for work.
So I thought I’d just tear the thing apart and simply run a long ide cable outside the case to a normal cdrom drive and load OS X on it. No such luck, the slimline drive in the iMac has a strange compact IDE interface that doesn’t look compatible with either laptop ata or regular ata.
So I simply ran the primary IDE cable out of the case through the hole left by the extracted cdrom drive and put both the hard drive and the cdrom on the same ATA cable with the hard drive as master and the cdrom as slave. This worked fine except I couldn’t boot off the cdrom! I googled and found that the iMac will only boot off master devices.
So what did I do? Simple, I reversed the order! With the cdrom as master it let me boot off the OS X 10.3 cdrom, then I partitioned and installed the first stage of the OS X installer. When it came time to boot off the hard drive (after the first CD copies the base to the hard drive) I simply powered down, set the hard disk back to master and the CD as slave and voila! The install booted from the hard disk and continued on to disc 2 of the install. After the installer was all done and I was sure I didn’t need any more CD’s I shut down and re-assembled everything.
OS X 10.3.9 is not exactly screaming along on this machine but it’s fine for the script testing I have to do. Although I have to say, pink is not exactly my color.
i also bought a imac cheap and someone has deleted the files and appear to have taken part of the operating system with them…I have put in a disk with the op syst. on it and tried to restart to load (I am ibm compat familiar, have not played with mac before) but nothing happens, loads existing software off hdrive and contines to get stuck half way through…is my cdrive dead or do i have to alter something to get it to recog the cd rom….Judy
Judy,
To boot the mac from the cd-drive you need to hold the C key down when you power it on until you hear it booting from the cd or you get the boot screen.
With that in mind, my imac had a bum CD-Drive, I understand it’s a common condition on the older non LCD models. Unless you feel like wrenching inside the case and adding a slave device onto the HDD IDE cable I would suggest looking for a replacement CD-ROM on e-bay. You should be able to get one for $10.