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Hard drive won't mount, optical drive won't play

The only way I can get this machine to boot lately is if I boot with the HD from Firewire. And when I do so, the optical drive won't play any media; DVD or CD. Any ideas?

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Hi:

I've tried both suggestions and on either case System Profiler did not show the optical drive or the HD.. Is it possible that the IDE channel is broken. I'm thinking this because both the optical and the HD are connected to the same channel.

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Wow, sorry to hear that. Is the hard drive confirmed good? If not, I'd make sure it works, and then I'd remove the optical drive, and get a known-good replacement hard drive cable, and see if that makes a difference. It's a nice machine, and I wouldn't give up on it until it failed to work with a known-good hard drive and hard drive cable. I'd eliminate the optical for the moment and just focus on the HD first.

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Hi! From what you stated I'm guessing the optical drive is powered on and accepting media. If you go into About This Mac, does it show that an optical drive is connected? If so, and it's not reading media and/or kicking out all media, it may be a bad drive.

While you're booting from an external hard drive, I'd also go into About This Mac and see if it shows your local hard drive at all. If it does, you may want to go into Disk Utility, format it (if it will format), and then see if you can re-install the OS via target mode with the OS media in the other machine's optical drive.

Hopefully this will help. If not, let me know as many details as possible and I'll try to assist further. Thanks!

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Thanks for this. I can confirm that the hard drive works because it boots when in Firewire. Where can I get the hard drive cable? Thanks so much for your help.

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Nesta will be eternally grateful.
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