This 1.25GHz single processor MDD has been having problems for a few weeks. I've backed up everything on the hard drives, so that's good, but haven't had time to replace the drives, reinstall the OS's, move the files, etc.
The short question is, how do I get the optical drive to open so that I can insert OS install media, given that I can't boot the machine from any of the hard drives, and there's no media currently in the optical drives? The open tray button doesn't seem to work from the gray screen the machine gets stuck at. I flipped down the mirror door, but didn't see an obvious hole for the paperclip trick. Should I look again? Okay, on to the long version. At least one of the drives, is doing the whir/clunk, whir/clunk thing some of the time, and yet, once the machine boots, it's still readable (usually). The boot volume (10.4.11) has less than a gigabyte free and occasionally throws up a message to the effect that it needs more space. There are three physical drives in the machine. The 10.4.11 volume is most of a 250 GB Maxtor drive. There's an installation of 10.5.? on an 80 GB drive. Another 250 GB drive is pure data. Last night I tried to use the machine to download a file quickly. "Could not connect..." Checked the "Network" panel and found that the IP address was self-assigned, and clicking refresh DHCP (forget exact wording) didn't help. I checked the wiring closet, and the Netgear Gigabit switch says that the MDD is connected at 10 Mbps. Weird. Forgetting the near-dead state of the hard drive(s) I decided that the machine needed a reboot. I shut down. It got to the blank blue screen with spinning wheel and just sat there for a long time, without finishing the shut down. Perhaps I should have left it alone for several hours, but I finally forced power off with the front button. After powering back on, the machine bonged nicely, and then just sat at the gray screen, with no spinning balls, nor text, nor mouse pointer. The gigabit switch indicates that there's no connection from the MDD while it's stuck at this screen. I guess the network isn't active yet. I powered off and tried booting again, holding down the option key. I figured, if nothing else I should be able to choose the Leopard volume. I get a blue screen with a little looped arrow in a rectangle on the left side, and a right pointing arrow in a rectangle on the right side, but no bootable drive icons. The mouse pointer is a wrist watch. The hands run for a while, but eventually stop and nothing else changes. Powered off again, and replaced the PRAM battery. It's at least five years old. Can't hurt? Zapped the PRAM wtih CMD-OPT-P-R at boot, but got exactly the same symptoms in a different screen resolution. :-) Soooo, looks like I'm probably at a point where I don't have a choice about replacing that hard drive(s) if I want to continue to use this machine, but how do I get the optical drive open so that I can insert an OS install disk? I guess if worse comes to worst, I can disconnect all the drive cables, and try plugging in an external bootable volume. Sigh, I really just wanted to download one little file, extract one part of its content (DMG file) and carry it to a non-osx machine on a thumb drive. Little projects turn into big projects... Thank you for any helpful or humorous suggestions. -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
