New iMac cd drive broken

I

Ionas

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I have an iMac (the flatscreen model) that I have been using for a little short of a year. Recently, my cd drive has begun to churn cds for several minutes, then spit them out, fail completely to read som cds, mount them but then fail to display the cd contents, mount the cds but fail during installations/copying etc. When it first happened, the resulting error led the drive to try to read a cd for forty minutes. When I finally pulled the power chord, since the system was all locked up, my hd suffered great damage and had to be completely reformatted.

The peculiar thing is: I've had this problem with my two [!] previous imacs, both of the older, dv line of iMacs. My local apple centers said they had never seen this before, that the drive had to be replaced, and that it would cost me hundreds of dollars. Apple has never adressed this error to my knowledge, but I've met many others who have suffered from it as well. It's pathetic that users should have their computers rendered more or less unusable, with no support from apple, when it seems to be a rather common problem.

So, now I'm curious if any other imacers around here have encountered the problem, and if anyone has ever managed to solve it. I'm using os x 10.2.6.
 
Maybe a problem with the care you have for your CDs ? The CD reader head is very sensitive to dust... and even more to fluids like coke ! Are you CDs always clean ?
 
Oh, yes. That's what mystifies me. My computer is untouched by weather, winds, liquid and body fluids ;-) The technicians at the repair shop would have noticed if it was just dust/smudge/dirt. This was strangely undetectable, and possibly software-related. (I know that it sounds unlikely, but just after the reformatting of my harddrive, the drive worked fine for a while.)
 
Does your Mac stay on horizontal ground (may sound strange, I know...) ?

Do you do anything special on software side ?

I ask strange question as it is strange that you had the problem several times.

Or do you try to rip protected CDs ?
 
No ripping here, other than when I dress every morning. And apart from the fact that my desk curves downwards in the middle, all horizontal. Special software stuff... lezze... Music recording and editing, but that's common enough. Some unix dabbling. I sometimes return to os 9 to play tekken on vgs ;-) But that's about it.

I know apple issued a warning and an update for the superdrive. Something about how burning high-speed media could damage the superdrive. However, my iMac was not supposed to be affected by that (it was manufactured after the by apple given date), and software update never showed the superdrive update firmware.
 
Were these full size CDs or the mini version? Those mini's cause big headaches.
That date given by Apple had to match your build date, not the purchase date. Did you check the model/serial number of the drive from Apple System Profiler to the list Apple gave? That is the important match.
 
Yes, thanks to you, I just did ;-) But the number complied with the newer superdrive serial numbers, so it can't be that either...
 
That's the problem. According to my local apple supplier, this is not covered by the guarantee, since it seems to be difficult to locate the problem. And replacing the drive costs many hundreds of dollars.
 
When did you buy your iMac? In European Union the purchases such as computers and mobile phones, purchased after a certain date that depends on country (in italy it was march or june of last year - check for Sweden) have 24 months of warranty, not 12. So if the law in your country was allowing you already 24 months of warranty on the day you purchased your iMac, you have 24 months. Even if the Apple booklet in that case promises you only 12, they have to give you 24.
 
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