How to open a SUN CDROM drive box?

[Ethan Dicks]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 1:23 PM, Mattis Lind <mattislind at gmail.com> wrote:
>> There are a couple of locking tabs on the sides in the back corner.
>> You poke at them through the holes in the outer shell.  They look
>> decorative.  Two of them are not.
>
> That did the trick! Thanks! I think I never would have found out by
> myself...

Excellent!

>> > The drive doesn't seem to work properly. Either I need to get it working
>> > somehow or replace it with a new (512 byte block capable) drive.
>
> It can eject the caddy. But I am not really sure it actually rotates. Maybe
> some lubricant has became a little too sticky over the years. The activity
> LED lights up when the caddy is inserted and then goes dark after some very
> low noise inside.  Nothing more happens and the SUN machine just sits there
> doing nothing.
>
> BTW. It is a SONY drive.

If you have a modern machine with SCSI, you could try it there.  I
think a Linux box would give you better error messages, but even a
Windows machine could tell you something.

I'd be looking in my logs for the report that it's on the bus, and any
traffic that occurs on insertion or when you try to mount the media,
and see if lights blink then, etc.

OTOH, it's probably not hard to find an old Sony or Plextor mech to
drop in there, as long as it has the 512-byte jumper set (ISTR there
are some drives that's it's a solder-blob option).

-ethan