eMac optical drive doesn't play discs.

[Will Gavin]

I've got a old eMac set up in my shed. With the help of this forum I have connected it to my network, and it's fine with the Internet now. But I'm having trouble with getting the optical drive to work. It opens and closes all right, but when I put a CD or a DVD in, it closes, waits a few seconds and then opens again, making no indication it recognises the discs.

I've got a LaCie external dvd drive, and I can play a DVD on that (though the eMac doesn’t seem willing to play CDs), so I know the eMac can play DVDs OK. I hoped it might just be that the lense needed cleaning, but when I put in the tray a lens cleaner designed for DVD (and Blu-Ray), it just spat this out after a few seconds, and it didn't play the instructions the way these cleaners do.

Any suggestions as to what might be the problem? And anything I might be able to do to sort it? Any chance it might be just that there's some obvious thing I'm failing to do. I'm quite experienced with PCs and ipads, but Mac desktops are a new world to me.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

It sounds like the internal optical drive of the eMac may have hardware issues. If you can play DVDs on the external LaCie, it should also be able to play CDs. Did you try that?

C

 

[Will Gavin]

Hullo,
Yes, it seems the internal optical disc is at fault. If it's a hardwire issue, and it needs replacing I think I'll give that a miss, and settle for using the external LaCie. I'm still hoping it may be some kind of software problem that might be fixed.

I've been having a look at the manuals, and I think the problem I had with the CDs may have been that I wasn't doing things right. In any case it's not a bid deal - I rarely use computers to play CDs. That goes for DVDs too - what's more significant is, will I be able to use the external player to run discs with installing programs and so forth. I haven't tried that yet, but I would think I should be able to.

Thanks for the post.