optical drive?

So a while back My optical drive of my iMac slowly started to not burn anything and then slowly stopped reading discs. So now I order a new drive to replace it and I made sure it was the same one 100% as I know it would not work if it's not the same one, by the way the place I got it from looked it up by my iMac serial number to make sure it was the correct one. Now I'm over here trying to replace it and I did but for some reason it is not powered on at all while the computer other then that works 100% fine. So my question is why if it's the same model number optical drive would it not be working? any advice? thanks in advance

If it's the same exact model optical drive that it replaced, I would recommend going back over your work to make sure that you installed it correctly. Either that, or the new drive may be defective.

You can take a look on how it's supposed to be hooked up by going to iFixit: The free repair manual and look up your model iMac and the instructions for changing out the drive.

I'm puzzled as to why you went through the trouble and expense of replacing the drive. For probably the same price, and far less hassle, you could have found and external FW or USB case and bought a DVD drive to slap in it and simply used that instead.

baggss said:

I'm puzzled as to why you went through the trouble and expense of replacing the drive. For probably the same price, and far less hassle, you could have found and external FW or USB case and bought a DVD drive to slap in it and simply used that instead.

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1st off I have an LG external optical drive that I been using for the longest, but this drive is starting to give me problems as well from time to time even though it works majority of the time. Second I bought the iMac from Best Buy with a warranty and when it was still under warranty all this happened with the optical drive and even though I did nothing wrong to break it Best Buy/Geek Squad made up something to say I did and wanted to charge me $900 just to replace it under warranty, so that is when I got the LG external optical drive. Now I was having a hard drive problems witch I fixed buy replacing the hard drive and installing a fresh new copy of OSX on the iMac and I also decided to up grade the ram while doing the repairs and everything else I did is working 100%. But to be honest now that I already payed for the replacement and had to wait for shipping for the optical drive and it is already in the system it is just not powering up, I think it's worth trying to fix now.

chscag said:

If it's the same exact model optical drive that it replaced, I would recommend going back over your work to make sure that you installed it correctly. Either that, or the new drive may be defective.

You can take a look on how it's supposed to be hooked up by going to iFixit: The free repair manual and look up your model iMac and the instructions for changing out the drive.

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I used that sites guide to replace it in the 1st place, and I already went back over my work 4 different times before coming to forums for help. Also, as I told the other poster I did 3 other things repair wise to the iMac and thous where with out looking at any guides or with out getting any help and though's things are working 100% fine now. So I know what I'm doing, the only reason I looked at the guide to replace the optical drive is because I never replaced a optical drive before on a Mac or on a windows PC and even though for the most part most of the steps where what I thought they and few things that I did not know, but I got it to match the sites guide 100% so it should be working. So with all this being said what should I do?

Are you sure the ribbon cable is plugged in and seated correctly on the drive? Check the other end where it plugs into the Logic board.

Also I hope you did not damage that Ribbon. If so that is your issue.

I did the one on my last gen iMac G5 and the cable it pretty delicate from memory.

dtravis7 said:

Are you sure the ribbon cable is plugged in and seated correctly on the drive? Check the other end where it plugs into the Logic board.

Also I hope you did not damage that Ribbon. If so that is your issue.

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everything is fine as far the ribbon, but if the ribbon was broken or not seated correctly I would of seen that as I checked and retracked the steps 4 times after I found out it did not work.

If it has a break you probably would not see it. It happens a lot with some Macs mostly with the hard drive ribbon.

dtravis7 said:

If it has a break you probably would not see it. It happens a lot with some Macs mostly with the hard drive ribbon.

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I'm just saying, I fixed my HDD and it works, so I know the HDD ribbon works just fine lol.

pbure0110 said:

But to be honest now that I already payed for the replacement and had to wait for shipping for the optical drive and it is already in the system it is just not powering up, I think it's worth trying to fix now.

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Yeah, I agree with you there....

pbure0110 said:

I'm just saying, I fixed my HDD and it works, so I know the HDD ribbon works just fine lol.

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That's fine, but what does that have to do with the ribbon cable for your optical drive? Staff member dtravis7 suggested changing out that cable because he has past experiences with it being bad and not being able to see if there is a break.