Pioneer DVR-K06A Superdrive replacement?

My advice to others with a dead Superdrive or regular stuck CD's is to not bother replacing the Superdrive and use an external DVD read/writer instead - that has a manual eject option.

There are reasons why people do not want to do this, for example installing OSX via USB might not work, but its easy to create a CDR file from your OSX disc and import the CDR image onto a partition and/or firewire HD and install from there.

Today I took the iMac 24" apart to get a stuck CD out from the 'SuperDrive'. The screen - on this iMac 2134 - is held in place to the motherboard by ribbon strips rather than cables, hence there were no visible connectors to disconnect. The Superdrive ribbon to motherboard held in place by a connector on the drive with T6 or T7 screws - I did not have a small enough Torex driver - so decided to open up the Superdrive in situ and lever apart the drive a little and use a credit card with double sided stick tape and lift up and pull out the CD.

The fault of the Superdrive was a driver confusion of some kind. There was a bar mechanism that operates to hold in the CD on import-insertion that was confused with ejection/read command, the bar would not drop to let out the disc on 'eject'.

When the iMac was started up, after removing the CD, there was an eject sound on the Superdrive and then the drive had gone back to normal idle quiet.

I now use a external LG portable DVD writer - LG GP30 Super Multi Drive, small and light weight, works better than the iMac Superdrive.

This is a great website its helped me a lot.