I’ve got an old G3 (beige) at work, and the button that opens the CD-ROM drive hardly works anymore. I can usually get it to open after 10 minutes of fiddling (once it’s open, everything else works fine–reading CDs, ejecting them later, etc.), but it’s getting a bit ridiculous. Is there any way I can fool the OS into opening the drive for me? I mean, it knows enough to do it when I drag a CD to the trash. Any workaround?
I guess once I get it open I’ll just always leave a CD in, ready to be dragged to the trash…
It was the case, in the matter of the Beige G3’s, of poor case design/manufacturing. With these, you are actually pushing a button that pushes a button, and the first button doesn’t correctly line up/has broken/has become twisted. Pop off the cover (by pressing the two buttons on the front of the case, under the drives, where the plastic bends in. Easy to see when you put your head low and look up) and you’ll see that the CD drive has it’s very own button. Look at the removed case, and you’ll see the backside of the button that pushes the button. This is probably damaged. Tear a button off your shirt, and super glue it to the button. Use only a small button, there isn’t that much of a difference that needs to be made.
Since you have the case off, grab a can of compressed air and clean that puppy out. I’ve seen enough dust in those machines to build a cat.
As a side note, I believe the new Macs support keyboard eject, where you simply press the eject key on the Apple Pro keyboard and it opens up the drive regardless of what’s in it. Apple’s own iTunes has a similar feature – click the eject button, and it’ll tell the drive to spit out whatever’s currently in there (even if it’s nothing at all).