How to force open a jammed DVD drive?

On an iMac G4, can't you pull open the outer optical drive door? If so, look for a paper-clip hole on the front of the actual drive mechanism; that should be the emergency eject hole. You should be able to insert something into that hole to depress the hidden button.

If that does not work, it must be some mechanical failure (as you mentioned yourself).

This take apart guide offers some advice for replacing the drive.

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/imacg4/imacg4takeapart.html

It should be a standard tray-loading optical drive, unlike earlier and later iMacs. It mentions a consideration for the length of the drive. The drives sold by OWC will probably work.

http://eshop.macsales.com/staticpages/Framework.cfm?page=superdrive/sdl_imacg4.html

On the optical drive inside a Power Mac G5, the pin-hole is on the front panel, toward the right side just below the bottom edge of the tray. I also looked at an older CDRW drive that is in an external case. It has a pin-hole at the same location.

iMac G4 Take-apart for Drive and RAM upgrades:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/imacg4/imacg4takeapart.html

{If replacing a defective drive, while in there, consider other items
that may be in need of attention; de-dusting the interior, upgrade the
hard-to-access RAM slot (in 1.25GHz iMac, can use 2GB total RAM)
and if the hard disk drive is getting old/tired, or too small, there it is.
Also, the clock battery. New thermal paste and a lot of details, too.}

Additional searches of iMac G4 take apart may yield more clues.

There used to be some fairly handy official documents available,
if you were an authorized service tech. Others were unauthorized
ones hosted online and those were pulled eventually. A place such
as iFixit has portable computer and later iMac take apart info; but
not sure of similar info online for the entire iMac G4 machine. For
my own information, used to troubleshoot my own iMac while it
was requiring repair and the authorized shop was unable to find a
single thing wrong with it, I have an original service manual in pdf.
And I troubleshooted the computer under AppleCare and the shop
was told to just fix it, after 3000 miles of travel to/from their shop
and six months of not being able to use the computer. The company
who messed up is no longer in business here. It soured me on mac.

Good luck & happy computing! 🙂

Hey MacUser,

If I pull down the outer tray door, you can see the front of the drive and that a small white gear inside turns ever so slightly before stopping completely. It refuses to budge.

It can happen that the disk gets displaces and can jam the door. Sometimes shaking it helps.

a small white gear inside turns ever so slightly before stopping completely

In most of these I've seen, they're direct driven usually via a rack. If something gets in there it can jam. I've worked on these using something like a trimmed chopstick to move the gear (or a toothpick). It takes a lot of rotations but I've opened them that way.
Richard

MacUser,

I've been unsuccessful in turning the gear at all. Applying more pressure yields no result. I've tried paperclips and a small screwdriver, etc. It just wouldn't budge.

Sometimes there's a latching mech that holds the drive closed.
Email me for more info on removing the drive.
Richard

Some of those optical drives appear to have a belt-drive and pulleys, so
moving a gear mechanism won't do anything; belts can slip and not let
a drive tray or slot mechanism eject an optical disc from the computer.

Once the actual drive is out of the computer it may be possible to dis-
assemble the optical drive to (hopefully) extract the disc held within.

Good luck & happy computing! 🙂

Have you gotten the chance to repair your optical drive?

You may have already tried this but in case you haven't...Boot or restart and immediately press and hold the OPTION key. When the Startup Manager appears on the screen, you may press the EJECT key on your keyboard or click on the cyclical arrow symbol on the screen; either way it might take the drive several seconds to respond.

Solution!!!

The Imac g4 has issues ejecting the dvd drive and Cd drives.

This is very common i just ran into this myself.

Solution the dvd drive will only eject if there is a os on the imac it has to do with the imac's firmware update when installing tiger..

not the end of the road...

i found that if you connect a external cd-rom/dvd-rom drive to the imac via usb or firewire you can boot the mac os x tiger installation off of that and once it is installed the mac will eject the cd drive and you can disconnect the external.