Broken Superdrive, rEFIt not working, external superdrive?

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This is by far the most annoying problem i've ever come into. My superdrive is broken (phantom of the opera lodged in there, it's the phantom of the macbook...it's there inside my mac). I'm trying to reinstall windows XP or 7 on the bootcamp partition.

I've tried to use rEFIt, but for some reason windows XP pro doesn't work (it recognizes the disk but it just goes blank with a blinking line when it tries to boot from disk), windows 7 x64 shows windows loading bar to load the installation but then doesn't go anywhere.

I'm getting really annoyed. If i get an external mac superdrive, will THAT work without needing refit? Or will it only look to the internal drive, in which case, can i just disconnect the internal and THEN use an external super drive?

Thanks...so annoying...
 
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Your Mac's Specs
20" Intel iMac 2.4 Ghz/3G Ram/320HD, Snow Leopard. PBook G4, 1.5Ghz/1.5 Ram/250 HD, Leopard 10.5.6.
You can install from an external drive so long as it has firewire.
What have you done to try and remove the stuck disc?
 
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Well, i got the disk out of the drive using double sided foam tape, some thin hard board, and a little force. Now the drive is completely dead (but was dead before, at least now it doesn't make those horrid noises when the computer starts up).

As for how to remove it, tried everything, shaking method, force eject, when i got the disk out, there were tons of metal scratch marks in it, so when the laptop fell, something broke and the drive was not recoverable.

I tried target disk mode with a buddy's macbook, no dice as well.

I'm heading to a store that has a firewire DVD drive that i'm going to use to install...this has been a huge pain in the butt. I just hope i don't run into more problems with this, i'm soooo going to back up using winclone and make sure this never, ever happens again >.>

Thanks for the help. Is there anythign i need to know when running the install from an external firewire? Just do an alt boot as normal and such?
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
Make sure you buy from a store that will accept returns. I'm not sure that you can install Windows with any kind of external optical drive. The problem that you will run into is that the drivers needed to recognize the drive are not loaded until after Windows boots.

It's easy to do on a Win machine because you can set boot devices in the BIOS, however, an Intel Mac uses EFI instead.

The only way I know to install Windows with a broken superdrive is to use rEFIt which you've already tried and failed.

Let us know.

Regards.
 

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