Hi Mark,
Welcome to the FineTunedMac forums. I was merging your two separate posts concerning your iMac optical drive into a single thread as they are closely related and all the info will be more easily followed in one thread....as you were making the same edit on your end.
As a short aside, were you formerly in Poway?
If you haven't been there yet you might try looking at the searchable database at the
xlr8yourmac web site....very informative and quite possibly a large part of your solution.
As to how to get into your iMac to make the swap internally, it may be simpler and less exposure to damage potential to simply put your replacement optical drive into a Firewire/USB2 external enclosure. I believe that there are several photo/video tutorials on how to open your machine from reputable sources....have you tried a Google search yet?
Best of luck and let us know how it goes.
Lee
(aka MacManiac)
