Hi Hank, Before you call on Apple Care, try checking access to the drive from another account on your iMac. If you haven't already done so, create a test account. Log in under the test account and insert your CD. Check whether you get the same error messages.
On Friday, October 12, 2007, at 11:42AM, "hank smith" wrote: >hello I am running in to some cd rom issues on my imac >I got a io device error message on one cd >after that it would not read any more disks >it is also spitting the disk back out 99.9 percent of the time >when it is not spitting the disk out it refuses to read the disk >1 is my drive dieing? >2. is this covered under apple care getting it replaced? >thanks >Hanl > > I once started to get CDs ejected under my account, but only under my account. In my case this ultimately got tracked to a corrupted preference list file (but the drive originally started to eject a specific CD with a weird identification, and then ejected others). I think the guy at the Apple Store checked by booting my Mac off another disk with the same operating system but which was not my cloned backup (I'd already tried that). From the symptoms he could tell that the drive itself was OK, and that depending on the results of the test account behavior, I could fix things with an archive and install (if the test account showed the same problem as my account). Since the test account was clean, the problem was likely to be a corrupted .plist file, and an archive and install wouldn't help my account. We moved the preference list files to my Desktop, and the CD was fine, since OS X generated new .plist files with default selections. (Note this would include the preference to get VoiceOver talking; you'd have to get this reset or copy back the .plist file associated with your VoiceOver settings before you rebooted your computer or you would be in a fix.) I don't think your symptoms necessarily mean a bad CD ROM drive, but you might not be able to diagnose all this by yourself. I certainly didn't have access to another disk drive with the operating system but without my accounts to boot from. If the drive is bad and you're covered by Apple Care then yes, they should replace it. Sorry not to have more helpful thoughts about this. And there's no obvious .plist culprit to look for if this is the case. Esther
