Problems Cubed

My home system is the short lived Apple G4 Cube. When I bought it, the processor was more than adequate, and the size was perfect for my very limited space. And because it was about to be discontinued, there was a nice rebate on it too. It has served us well in the Macklin household. Until the other day.

My son unearthed a very old CD of some children's educational game and asked if he could play it. Sure. No problem I thought. I can run the installer in Classic. (For those not OS X savvy Classic is OS 9 running on top of OS X).

Well the installer just did not want to run in Classic. It's rare but it happens. No problem I thought. I can just reboot the system into OS 9 install an reboot to X. Chances are the game would play in Classic even of the installer wouldn't.

Here's were a bit of history comes into play. When I was doing the upgrade to OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) there were some low level directory errors that were blocking the install and that could not be fixed. So I backed everything up, stuck in the Tiger install disk and told it's disc utility to do a low level format then I installed the upgrade and went on my merry way.

So, I tell the system to reboot in OS 9 and the result is the last thing a Mac User wants to see, a little icon of a floppy disc with blinking question mark in the middle of it. this means the computer cannot find a disc with a valid operating system.

Another bit of history. At one point my son decided to load his own game on the system. So he slid a CD into the slot loading drive. It probably look some effort since there was already a disc in it. Thus the factory installed CD ROM drive was destroyed. Which was not entirely bad since the only replacement I could find was a superdrive. There was a dark side to that too though. The internal drives for G4s are IDE. The new superdrive was hardwired as a master which meant fiddling around with the jumpers on the hard drive to make it a slave. Big pain in the rear but I got it done. (It should be noted that ease of access to ANY component other than RAM was not a consideration in the design of the Cube.)

So I have the blinking question mark icon and my master drive has a CD in it that none of the standard methods of ejecting will cause to eject. There is no option to manually eject a disc. Because the master is hung up on the CD the standard shortcut of holding down the X key at startup to force OS X to launch didn't work. So I opened the case and undid the eight crews that would sort of give me access to the 4 screws that to the CD drive bracket. I got that out and there was no visible means of manually ejecting a disc. So I removed the drive form the bracket. Still no manual eject.

There were a few small holes around the drive that I probed with a paper clip to see if they were the elusive manual eject. No such luck.

So I got my tiny screwdriver and opened the drive case and removed the CD. But the whole thing back together, re-installed the drive, put back all the the screws, plugged everything back in.

Blinking question mark icon.

No problem I thought. I'll just drop in the Tiger install disc and go from there. Problem. The CD drive still thought it had a disc in it. So I unplugged it all. Took out all the screws. Removed the drive from the bracket and opened the drive case. I fiddled around with all the moving bits for a few minutes but there really was no way to re-set the mechanism. So I put in the Tiger disc, put the whole thing back together. AGAIN.

But it booted off the install CD. I ran the disc utility over the hard drive to make sure it wasn't completely hosed, then rebooted off the hard drive in OS X. And all is well.

The moral of the story is - once you have formatted your hard drive for Tiger. DO NOT attempt to boot System 9.

The question left unanswered is, why in hell would anyone design a slot loading CD drive without any manual eject?

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 06:10 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment