Anchor

If this weren’t such a pain it would be hilarious: my embattled iMac’s brand new Super Drive has given up the ghost after only a couple of weeks of operation.

Not having a working Super Drive was a serious concern because it impeded my ability to install Leopard seeds and made system recovery in the event of a hard drive failure next to impossible. So I went to considerable lengths to acquire and install a new drive.

Well, last night I installed a new Leopard seed after booting off the drive. The machine booted fine and the install disc was visible on the desktop and its contents could be seen in the Finder, but I had to go out.

On returning, the disc was still visible on the desktop but its contents were no longer anywhere to be seen: "0 items", claimed the Finder. ls in the terminal also returned an empty listing. I ejected the disk and reinserted it but the volume wouldn’t mount. Apple System Profiler claimed that no burner was detected.

I rebooted into Tiger and same thing: the profile claims there is no burner any more, and the eject key has no effect.

So I currently have a useless Leopard install (I didn’t have time to install the Xcode Tools before the failure and so can’t do any development work) and a useless Super Drive which worked brilliantly for only two weeks before dying. The Super Drive is now effectively reduced to an expensive, unopenable CD jewell case containing a Leopard seed disc and envolved in wreaths of white plastic and inconveniently-located torx screws.

Sure, I can get around the roadblock on Leopard development by downloading the latest seed disk image all over again and installing the Xcode Tools from that, but I am still left with the problem of a machine that can no longer boot from DVD in the event of a failure; and failure seems all too likely with such a flakey piece of hardware.

I really can’t wait to see the tail end of this horrid machine. It’d probably make a better boat anchor than anything else; it’s got the right shape for it.