Here we go...more details...
ok, please excuse the long story, sometimes too much info is good...
ok, the whole deal started when this computer belonged to a customer and he had issues with bootcamp, we reached a point where the machine would not recognized the windows side, so he took it to the apple store and they told him that they could not do anything about the files on the windows partition, luckily for this customer he called me from the store, and I advised him to let me thinker with it, I did.
I opened the imac and removed the hard drive in an effort to recover his files, i decided i would put it as a slave drive in another pc running some macdrive software...no luck....
Later I installed the drive back and after trying several hourswith the option key at boot up, The machine actually went into windows and I was able to recover his files to a wd external hardrive.
The customer took the iMac back to the applestore and they replaced the drive for free...very nice from them, they had however called me at the customer request and warned me that since they noticed fingerprints on the glass they would not normally service the machine, but because of the agreement they had with the customer they would. I of course told them that the only reason I opened it was to recover the data...(and I did!!).
By then I had offered to buy the machine from the customer so i could get more familiar with iMacs since i did not own one at all. My customer is well off and decided that it was a good idea to have his "tech" owned one, and bought an exact replacement. that is probably why the apple store did not argue much about the old iMac no more.
When I got the used one (of course), needles to say it had that brand new replacement hard drive in it, and I started trying to install boot camp on it, it was then that I noticed that the dvd drive was not always reading the dvd drive, by this i mean, that it would sometimes recognize a cd and sometimes it would not recognize the same cd.
Unfortunately many of those times were when i was installing windows on the boot partition, so i finally gave up and decided to make it work first on the iMac side and then later would take care of the bootcamp deal...
I reached a point where the iMac would not read the dvd's at all, so I started looking for a DIY replacement, after all i've worked with pc's a for years and "believed" i could pull this one out....wrong!
since my dvd drive was a superdrive, i took the wrong assumption that an external superdrive could work with it, and went got one at bestbuy, I was about to take it apart and install it when i decided to test it in the usb port....it did not work, then i called apple support ("India") and they assured me they were compatible....wrong!!!
Advised by the apple support people i went to bestbuy to get a replacement, but this time i ask them to try it on the same iMac i have that they had on display..it did not work...it only worked on the airbook...frustrated, i called apple at the spot, and Indeed they apologized and said that the external drive was not compatible...
I asked them if the unit inside the external drive was the same as the one in the iMac and they could not answer...so i decided to take the replacement just in case..if it was different i would just take it back....
Once at home, i opened the external drive and it was exactly the same model, but not the same firmware, i preceeded to install it, but again, it showed the error...the disk could not be read....
The profiler showed the drive and you can hear it spin but no luck....
It was then when i remember that the iMac machine did not have leopard install at first, but the customer upgraded it to it...so I went and reinstalled leopard, still the dvd did not work, I tried upgrading to snow leopard, and still no luck.
I tried installing the original cd before leopard, but it would not let me, of course i've been installing leopard and snowleopard from an external dvd drive....that BTW happens to be DVD ROM, and it's 9 years old....
So, my question is, is Tiger what is installed before leopard?...
could it be possible that this affected the dvd drive? or it should work regardless?...
Remember the dvd drive is new, and it worked on the airbook fine, the only thing i did was remove the little board that the usb like connector comes from before installing it in the iMac...i believe is more software related than anything, but you guys are the expers!!...so kindly again......HELP!!!!!
