Optical drive weirdness

[Bill Raffensperger]

Friend has a 15 inch flat screen iMac from April 2002. 700MHz G4, 
256MB, Mac OS 10.2.8. The combo drive will not recognize or mount any 
CDs. No audio CDs, no system CDs, nothing. Except for one - the Disk 
Warrior 3.0 CD. Put in a Jaguar disk, Panther disk, TechTool Deluxe 
disk, hold down C key during reboot and it boots from the hard drive. 
Hold down the option key during start up and insert all kinds of 
start-up disks and it'll spit them all back out, except for the Disk 
Warrior CD. That one'll show up and you can boot from it.

So I ran Disk Warrior,  zapped the pram,  booted with Command-S and ran 
fsck,  booted with Command OF and reset nvram. Firewired my Target Disk 
Mode iBook to the iMac, and booted the iMac from my iBook, and the iMac 
optical drive was still fubar. You can hear it start to spin, 
haltingly. It just doesn't spin up.

System Profiler sees the optical drive just fine. Cannot boot from the 
Hardware test CD. The firmware is corrupted? Or what? The drive works 
fine, but only with one CD. How weird is that?