I've just got my hands on an old imac dv se, but the optical drive is stuffed. Where can you find a replacement for it (it has a cd-rom/dvd-rom), and how much would something like that cost??

Also, is it possible to change the colour casing on one of these???

Thanks,
Jesski

Try your luck on the Wanted To Buy section of MacTalk. Noticed quite a few members here with spare parts.

Post a new thread there headed: WTB: and then the rest of your Title.

cheers,

cw

Any slot-loading drive from an iBook/PB or iMac will work.

It's possible to change the casing colour as the main plastic enclosure can be unclipped and replaced. The only good way to go this would be to find a dead iMac DV SE and switch the components around.

JB

It's a slot loader, right ?
A laptop slot load drive is what you need.
But in order to boot the machine from the drive wthout another system already installed on the HD it must be a drive set to master in firmware, not slave or cable select. - ie C key held down to boot. This is only really an issue if you want to install a new HD or the existing system is screwed and you need to reinstall by a cold boot from a disk.

Matshita drives commonly used by Apple are a bit hard to buy as parts, whereas Pioneer drives are plentiful, but usually are not set as masters out of the box.

As the machine has Firewire ports, you also have the option to boot from an external disk or put the machine in FW Target disk mode connected to another mac to do such an installation. So it depends on the extent of your other mac resources if a master set drive is essential.

We'll need to buy the same unit (Have a 600MHz DV SE iMac G3 here) because the drive is somewhat temperamental

We have in the past bought a very nice drive (in that case for a PowerBook) from eBay which was a reasonable price, and worked brilliantly. As long as you know that it will work for Macs. The machine we got was a Pioneer DVD writer (I think it was an A5, but not 100% sure now), BTW.

While I don't know for sure, I get the impression from having had a CD/DVD drive replaced in a G4 iMac (produced in 2003), that you will need a version of MacOS X installed on the computer that will support the replacement CD/DVD drive. Apparently Tiger (OS 10.4) supports the latest Pioneer drives, which is what I had installed, but earlier versions of MacOSX and OS9/8 may not.
I have restricted a G3 iMac I own to 10.3.9 (500 Mhz/1 GB RAM/7200 RPM HD) because running 10.4 on it seemed to make it too slow. 10.4 was running off a FW attached hard drive and the intial Spotlight indexing was probably severely hampering performance, so performance on an internal HD, post the initial Spotlight indexing may be better than I experienced/expected with the G3.

A PM to MTAU regular antechinus55 might be worthwhile as he has, in the past, had collections of G3 imac parts. The cost should not be huge for a secondhand slot loading drive (I recently sold one for $10 or $15 plus postage ($10): I can't quite remember). The case is not the best part to replace as I found it needed to be flipped upside down for it to unclip just nicely and it is not quite clear, for a novice, how it all comes apart. The cost of the case plus shipping is unlikely to be make it a worthwhile exercise IMO.