Does your iMac have a Firewire port? If so, do you know another person who has a Firewire port equipped Mac who might be able to bring their Mac to your house for a short while. If so, get yourself a six-pin to six-pin firewire cable and attach the two Macs together using this cable and their respective firewire ports. Boot up the other Mac. When it has finished booting up, fire up your iMac but hold down the T key while doing so. You should see a Firewire symbol appear on the screen of your iMac, and your iMac's hard drive should show up on the desktop of the other Mac where it will act just like an old style SCSI external hard drive.
From there, I think you should be able to use the other Mac to load software onto your iMac, just like the good old days. Of course, you may find that the other Mac has to be running an OS at least at high as the one on your iMac.
If you don't have a firewire port on your iMac, then I think I would go for trying to find a replacement CD-ROM unit on eBay and get up the nerve to try replacing it myself (yourself). There is a do-it-yourself write up for upgrading the hard drive on an iMac, available somewhere on the Internet, and popping out the CD-ROM drive is like the second last step before they get to the hard drive. Come to think of it, if you are going to dig all the way in to replace the CD-ROM drive, you might give some thought to popping in a larger hard drive while you are there. Of course, then you definitely will have an issue about how to get your files off your old hard drive onto the new hard drive. Once again, if you have a firewire port I would vote for buying an external firewire enclosure to house your original internal drive.
Good luck!
Jim Foster President Macintosh Users East [MaUsE] http://www.mause.ca
On 3-Feb-04, at 5:44 PM, Stephen Kenda wrote:
if that is the recommendation, where is a good source for these slot-loading cdrom drives? (ebay,
swap-list, post to this list....???)
many thanks in advance,
stephen kenda
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