Paladin of the Pegasos
Posts: 1535 from 2012/11/9
From: Manchester, UK/GB
Quote:
koszer wrote: The problem when replacing an optical drive in a Mac Mini is - you need exactly the same model, not a similar one. I've once tried replacing the drive with the one from a PowerBook and although theoreticaly it should work - it didn't (the same symptoms you're describing).
I thought that too, BUT, as you can read above, I currently have a
UJ-875C, and I've had a
UJ-85J-C drive installed and as a stop-gap I had a
CW-8123/8124C drive, but that was swapped out for a
UJ-845-C drive soon afterwards.
If you are installing Mac OSX then it actually loads the device driver into the firmware, and the issues you have mentioned of it seeming to be that the only DVD/CDRW drive that will be recognised is the original drive,
BUT if you do a fresh/NEW installation of Mac OSX then it loads in the firmware it needs for a specific drive, and in some way "locks" that into the OS so then you do need the same DVD/CDRW drive after that, until you do another fresh installation, at least those have been my findings, and I hope they are of some use to other users
.
MacMini 1.5GHz,64MB VRAM, PowerBooks A1138/9 (Model 5,8/9),PowerMac G5 2.3GHz(DP), iMac A1145 2.1GHz 20", all with MorphOS v3.18+,Airport,Bluetooth,A1016 Keyboard,T-RB22 Mouse,DVD-RW-DL,MiniMax,Firewire/USB2 & MacOSX 10.4/5
