My Mac Is Whack

Factual Questions
1

Specifically, it refuses to read any CD I put in it. I’m talking CDs with pictures and documents here as well as music CDs. Basically, it just keeps spitting them out. This is a new behavior, although, admittedly, I haven’t tried to feed it a CD in months.

My Mac is:

  • a G4
  • Runs 9.2 OS
  • Very snarky
  • Recognizes that the drive is in fact there, but oddly assigns it a SCSI ID of 0, as it does the hard drive.
  • All the necessary extensions are on

Why is my Mac being mean? How do I woo it back so it loves me again? I tried Mac help, I tried Mr. Google. Now I try Doper power.

2

Have you used a CD lens cleaning disk yet? The optics get dusty over time, and will eventually stop recognizing disks. Whether the drive chucks a disk back out, or eats it and possibly hangs seems to depend on exactly which model of Mac you have.
Some of those older Macs ran two SCSI buses; thus two drives with the same ID don’t necessarily imply a conflict.

3

Oooh. Good idea. Tomorrow I will get one. A regular one like they sell at Radio Shack should suffice, yes? I don’t need some special computer one I assume? I mean, a CD lens is a CD lens…

4

Parts is parts.
If the lens is really dirty, it may take several cleaning cycles to get the drive back up.

5

Unless your G4 came equipped with a SCSI card and hard drive, none of your drives should be showing up as SCSI devices. Have they always registered as SCSI devices?