I have an Imac 333 that i just recently upgraded with a Harmoni 600 mhz so i could use my ipod. After a while, my cd rom drive stopped working and it wouldnt read any cds at all. I put in the reinstall disc for panther to try to just clean install and fix it, and it read that. about halfway through the installation it says there are errors everytime. I was thinking about buying an external CD rom drive or maybe a CDRW. I would be able to just read cds from that though right? or should i just buy an external one? Anybody have any suggestions? Thanks
Problems with Imac CD drive
- Thread starter dunks40
- Start date
andychrist
devil's plaything
You should certainly be able to burn CDs from a macpatable firewire CDRW drive.
I have an Original Bondi iMac 233MHz with an iForce G4 500MHz upgrade. My CD rom drive is also on its way out; it frequently won't load CDs, and often stutters on music CDs. Cleaning the lens and sliding the carrier back and forth can get it working again sometimes, but it is no long-term fix. I'm tempted to get the internal CDRW from MCE but it is $180 and on back-order! But you have firewire so you could get a good external drive much cheaper, around $100 or so. If you don't need write-ability, you can still get a replacement internal drive for $70. Check out
http://www.dvwarehouse.com/product_info.php/cPath/37_238_246_479/products_id/2153
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/
and their site sponser,
http://www.macsales.com/, for compatability.
Wish I had bought the Harmoni, even though the iForce (discontinued) works great.
Cheers.
I have an Original Bondi iMac 233MHz with an iForce G4 500MHz upgrade. My CD rom drive is also on its way out; it frequently won't load CDs, and often stutters on music CDs. Cleaning the lens and sliding the carrier back and forth can get it working again sometimes, but it is no long-term fix. I'm tempted to get the internal CDRW from MCE but it is $180 and on back-order! But you have firewire so you could get a good external drive much cheaper, around $100 or so. If you don't need write-ability, you can still get a replacement internal drive for $70. Check out
http://www.dvwarehouse.com/product_info.php/cPath/37_238_246_479/products_id/2153
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/
and their site sponser,
http://www.macsales.com/, for compatability.
Wish I had bought the Harmoni, even though the iForce (discontinued) works great.
Cheers.
Thanks for all of your help. I don't know if you do want that Harmoni actually. I had to clean install OS 9 to install the software for it, and now my computer wont upgrade or clean install Panther. So i put in the Jaguar cd to install it, and everything works fine. It's all installed, and i opened up some apps and it was fast, but they quit right away. Then i did the software update to get 10.2.8 thinking that would help, and when i restarted, there was a fuzzy line across the screen when the apple came up and it started to load. I followed the directions very carefully while installing, and i don't really know what to do. i guess i'll just have to register it with sonnet and see if they can replace it. anyone have any suggestions? any help is greatly appreciated!
andychrist
devil's plaything
The good people at Sonnet give excellent technical support, I hear; so until they can help you sort this out:
Have you run Disk Utilities (from the OS X CD) to try to repair both the HD and Permissions? If DU finds disk errors and can't repair them, or if it does repair them but your system still won't work, the best bet then is to initialize the disk before having another go at installing Panther. Remember when initializing to choose the Extended format, and, if your HD is more than 10 GB, OS X must be installed on a partition within the first 8 GB. You'll also want to install the drivers for OS 9 along with OS X.
It is of course possible that, after four or five years, your HD is failing. There are a couple of recommended diagnostics for this, Disk Warrior being the favored tool at the moment. Trouble is of course that it is not cheap, you'd pay less for a new HD. (Actually, a new $60, 80 GB 7200rps HD would also greatly speed up your old iMac.) Also your RAM may not be up to OS X.3; had you been running Panther successfully before the Harmoni upgrade? And, as you mentioned problems with the CD player, perhaps that also could have given you the bad install. (During my first attempt to install Jaguar over an irreparably corrupted OS X.1 volume, my iMac hung after about an hour into the process; two subsequent attempts at a clean install resulted in failure at around the same place in the disk. Only by using a later version install CD was I finally able to get my beloved BondiMac up and running again. My machine still has occasional problems with both music and data CDs, but once it does manage to mount an install disk it generally has no further problems with it. Panther's CD1 install went swimmingly; it then instructed me to install CD2 but did not recognize it. Fortunately there wasn't anything I needed on there that I couldn't scare up elsewhere... but I digress.)
There are so many variables at play here, it is hard to know for sure if the Harmoni is the culprit. Do you still have the original processor, or did you have to send your board out for the swap? Would be a shame if you had to return the new accelerator...
Xlr8yourmac has recent reader's reviews of this particular upgrade. Unfortunately their forum is closed to new members so you can't ask anyone there for help. Maybe someone else here in MACOSX land has expertise with the Sonnet Harmoni.
Hang in there.
Have you run Disk Utilities (from the OS X CD) to try to repair both the HD and Permissions? If DU finds disk errors and can't repair them, or if it does repair them but your system still won't work, the best bet then is to initialize the disk before having another go at installing Panther. Remember when initializing to choose the Extended format, and, if your HD is more than 10 GB, OS X must be installed on a partition within the first 8 GB. You'll also want to install the drivers for OS 9 along with OS X.
It is of course possible that, after four or five years, your HD is failing. There are a couple of recommended diagnostics for this, Disk Warrior being the favored tool at the moment. Trouble is of course that it is not cheap, you'd pay less for a new HD. (Actually, a new $60, 80 GB 7200rps HD would also greatly speed up your old iMac.) Also your RAM may not be up to OS X.3; had you been running Panther successfully before the Harmoni upgrade? And, as you mentioned problems with the CD player, perhaps that also could have given you the bad install. (During my first attempt to install Jaguar over an irreparably corrupted OS X.1 volume, my iMac hung after about an hour into the process; two subsequent attempts at a clean install resulted in failure at around the same place in the disk. Only by using a later version install CD was I finally able to get my beloved BondiMac up and running again. My machine still has occasional problems with both music and data CDs, but once it does manage to mount an install disk it generally has no further problems with it. Panther's CD1 install went swimmingly; it then instructed me to install CD2 but did not recognize it. Fortunately there wasn't anything I needed on there that I couldn't scare up elsewhere... but I digress.)
There are so many variables at play here, it is hard to know for sure if the Harmoni is the culprit. Do you still have the original processor, or did you have to send your board out for the swap? Would be a shame if you had to return the new accelerator...
Xlr8yourmac has recent reader's reviews of this particular upgrade. Unfortunately their forum is closed to new members so you can't ask anyone there for help. Maybe someone else here in MACOSX land has expertise with the Sonnet Harmoni.
Hang in there.
thanks for all your help andychrist. No, i havent run DU, how do you do that? just put in the OS X cd? because my computer is having problems even starting up as it is. Everytime i turn it on theres a fuzzy line over the apple and it just freezes. I did actually run Panther before i tried reinstalling, and i only reinstalled because the applications were quitting and it wasnt loading my cds. Let me explain my problems before.....
After i clean installed os 9 to install the sonnet software before installing the harmoni itself, i tried to upgrade to 10.3. Everything worked perfect on os 9, but it still had errors the first couple times trying to install panther. Around the third time, it worked its way through the first cd, but wouldnt recognize the second like you said. I sat there for about five minutes and opened and closed the drive, but it still wouldnt work, so i tried quitting and restarting from the start up disk. It restarted, and the cd still wouldnt work. So i was left with no choice but to quit the installer, which left me with the blue background. Then all of a sudden numbers started scrolling, so I unplugged it. I restarted and it did the same thing. The next time i restarted, the log in screen came up, and it asked me to put in my password, already having my username and my picture and everything. so i put in my password and it said it couldnt accept it at this time. It went to the panther background and loaded everything. by this time i was shocked. It already had messenger, and some programs from jaguar in the dock? i still can't figure out what happened, but it worked. occasionally apps would quit, but the firewire worked great and i loaded some songs onto my ipod. then it started not loading my cds which led me to the reinstall......
Sorry this was a little long, but now you know what i have gone through, lol. I do have the original processor though. So if worse comes to worse i could just put in the old processor and keep the 512 mb ram i have now. Tell me what you think. Thanks again andychrist!
After i clean installed os 9 to install the sonnet software before installing the harmoni itself, i tried to upgrade to 10.3. Everything worked perfect on os 9, but it still had errors the first couple times trying to install panther. Around the third time, it worked its way through the first cd, but wouldnt recognize the second like you said. I sat there for about five minutes and opened and closed the drive, but it still wouldnt work, so i tried quitting and restarting from the start up disk. It restarted, and the cd still wouldnt work. So i was left with no choice but to quit the installer, which left me with the blue background. Then all of a sudden numbers started scrolling, so I unplugged it. I restarted and it did the same thing. The next time i restarted, the log in screen came up, and it asked me to put in my password, already having my username and my picture and everything. so i put in my password and it said it couldnt accept it at this time. It went to the panther background and loaded everything. by this time i was shocked. It already had messenger, and some programs from jaguar in the dock? i still can't figure out what happened, but it worked. occasionally apps would quit, but the firewire worked great and i loaded some songs onto my ipod. then it started not loading my cds which led me to the reinstall......
Sorry this was a little long, but now you know what i have gone through, lol. I do have the original processor though. So if worse comes to worse i could just put in the old processor and keep the 512 mb ram i have now. Tell me what you think. Thanks again andychrist!
andychrist
devil's plaything
Okay, lemme get this straight: First you clean installed OS 9, then installed the Harmoni software, then the Harmoni, then 10.3, right? I mean you wouldn't have installed the Harmoni knowing that your OS was already screwed up. So had you never run Panther until after the Harmoni install? Before the fresh install of OS 9, you were running Jaguar? You see, in that case we don't know if it was anything on your original system, such as a failing CD or hard drive, Panther incompatible RAM, or even a bad install CD, that was causing the kernel panic that you witnessed (those scrolling numbers) right after the Panther install.
Not to worry though. I'm guessing that your attempts to install a stable OS may have failed simply because the target volume was in need of repair. You can address this problem with Disk Utility and another clean install of Panther:
Open the CD tray, power down, insert OS X (close the tray!), restart holding down the C key until the CD loads, wait half of an eternity for the Installer to come up, then, from the pull down Installer menu in the Menu bar, choose Disk Utility, wait the other half. Now without having an open installer in front of me to refresh my memory, the rest of these directions may be a little imprecise, but you'll get the general idea, DU is pretty self explanatory. Select the OS X volume from that column on the left and then click Repair Disk from the box in the right.
If it finds no errors and says volume appears to be OK, then hit Repair Permissions. If no repairs have to be made there either (which_would_really _surprise_me), then it may be that your CPU or RAM is bad, in which case a fresh install of Panther is not going to help. (Though it is possible for DU not to catch some HD errors.)
If it finds errors but corrects them and finally says disk appears to be okay (green text), great. You can then do a Repair Permissions and restart (quickly ejecting the OS X CD before it can reload) to see if things work out; if they don't, you can come back to DU using the same method as before, and then initialize as described below.
If, on the other hand, you run Repair Disk and it finds but cannot correct errors (red text), you will want to initialize the disk immediately, creating a partition within the first 8 GB of the drive if its capacity is over 10 GB. Any volume then created should be formatted OS X Extended-- as I recall, you have to click on each volume's rectangle in the diagram on the left in order to bring up its options. Just make sure that you don't leave any rectangle grayed out before hitting Initialize. You can then do a clean, custom install of OS X.3, omitting all those languages and printer drivers you don't need. Do choose to install the BSD sub system (checked by default) and drivers for OS 9, if you want to be able to install Classic later; don't check for iTunes and such if you have a high speed internet connection and can download them easily online. The idea is you want to put as little tax on the CD and hard drives as possible during installation, save disk space, and avoid having the installer ask you to move on to CD 2 after it completes optimizing the first disk.
I think there may be a bug in the installer that asks you to load the second CD when it isn't really necessary; if it does do that, just ignore those instructions and force quit the installer-- I think you may have to stick a paper clip into the reset button to do this. If you haven't seen any errors reported during installation and are not experiencing any hardware problems, then when your iMac restarts it should open to the set up screen and you should be good to go. If it does go okay from there, and you want to have a copy of OS 9 on your drive as well, you can install it on the same volume as X (if you want to be able to boot from it.) If you get another kernel panic, or OS X just is not behaving right, then you probably have bad RAM or a bad processor. You can try replacing either until your iMac is running again.
Errors you see during installation could indicate, in addition to either of the aforementioned problems, a faulty install CD, CD drive or hard drive.
Of course, if you swap back your old processor and can install and run the OS of your choice, then you know the problem is with the Harmoni.
Hope this has been some help, and remember: even people who have received bad upgrades from Sonnet rave about their support!
Good luck, and say how you made out.
Not to worry though. I'm guessing that your attempts to install a stable OS may have failed simply because the target volume was in need of repair. You can address this problem with Disk Utility and another clean install of Panther:
Open the CD tray, power down, insert OS X (close the tray!), restart holding down the C key until the CD loads, wait half of an eternity for the Installer to come up, then, from the pull down Installer menu in the Menu bar, choose Disk Utility, wait the other half. Now without having an open installer in front of me to refresh my memory, the rest of these directions may be a little imprecise, but you'll get the general idea, DU is pretty self explanatory. Select the OS X volume from that column on the left and then click Repair Disk from the box in the right.
If it finds no errors and says volume appears to be OK, then hit Repair Permissions. If no repairs have to be made there either (which_would_really _surprise_me), then it may be that your CPU or RAM is bad, in which case a fresh install of Panther is not going to help. (Though it is possible for DU not to catch some HD errors.)
If it finds errors but corrects them and finally says disk appears to be okay (green text), great. You can then do a Repair Permissions and restart (quickly ejecting the OS X CD before it can reload) to see if things work out; if they don't, you can come back to DU using the same method as before, and then initialize as described below.
If, on the other hand, you run Repair Disk and it finds but cannot correct errors (red text), you will want to initialize the disk immediately, creating a partition within the first 8 GB of the drive if its capacity is over 10 GB. Any volume then created should be formatted OS X Extended-- as I recall, you have to click on each volume's rectangle in the diagram on the left in order to bring up its options. Just make sure that you don't leave any rectangle grayed out before hitting Initialize. You can then do a clean, custom install of OS X.3, omitting all those languages and printer drivers you don't need. Do choose to install the BSD sub system (checked by default) and drivers for OS 9, if you want to be able to install Classic later; don't check for iTunes and such if you have a high speed internet connection and can download them easily online. The idea is you want to put as little tax on the CD and hard drives as possible during installation, save disk space, and avoid having the installer ask you to move on to CD 2 after it completes optimizing the first disk.
I think there may be a bug in the installer that asks you to load the second CD when it isn't really necessary; if it does do that, just ignore those instructions and force quit the installer-- I think you may have to stick a paper clip into the reset button to do this. If you haven't seen any errors reported during installation and are not experiencing any hardware problems, then when your iMac restarts it should open to the set up screen and you should be good to go. If it does go okay from there, and you want to have a copy of OS 9 on your drive as well, you can install it on the same volume as X (if you want to be able to boot from it.) If you get another kernel panic, or OS X just is not behaving right, then you probably have bad RAM or a bad processor. You can try replacing either until your iMac is running again.
Errors you see during installation could indicate, in addition to either of the aforementioned problems, a faulty install CD, CD drive or hard drive.
Of course, if you swap back your old processor and can install and run the OS of your choice, then you know the problem is with the Harmoni.
Hope this has been some help, and remember: even people who have received bad upgrades from Sonnet rave about their support!
Good luck, and say how you made out.