Help: Problem with Superdrive

[Ollie Cromwell]

I have a 2.33Ghz MBP which is now a couple of years old, since last week for some reason the Superdrive will not recognise blank media of any kind, tries to spin them up but eventually spits them out without mounting them or making them available to burn.

The drive will still recognise pre burned data disks or DVD's so its not totally dead.

Has anyone else had this problem and are there any suggestions for fault diagnosis / solution to this?

Cheers in advance for any help suggestions.

 

[rpaloalto]

Sounds like your drive is definitely on it's way out. Those are typical signs of drive failure due to normal wear and tear.

You might try getting one of those special cleaning kits that have the special CD with a small brush to clean your laser diode. You might also try a different brand of blank media.

 

[kyen1]

My optical drive also died a couple weeks ago. I tried using a cleaning disk which did nothing for me. I got my MBP in Aug 2006 so it will be 2 years old next month.

Honestly, I will probably just get a new MBP next month.

 

[Ollie Cromwell]

Would be nice to be able to justify it but......

My MBP is running very well still after two years so I cant ditch it and buy a shiny new one, have read that people in the apple support forums were having problems with files installed by the Western Digital MyBook hard disk, and I am using a WD passport drive but none of the files that seem to be the issue are present on my machine as it seems to be a RAID controller or something.

Have tried cleaning out the drive but no joy.

 

[noakail]

My MBP superdrive is doing the samething to me accept all media will not play. I did a search on the forums and found a that if the MBP is tilted a certain way it reads the disk sometimes. Its a pain but I can't turn it in until I return home.

 

[ultimateceej]

Mine wouldn't read DVD -R's for a while.

One day I tried using Vista via bootcamp to see if it would still load the DVD -R and it did. So I burned a video to the disc with Vista and then tried again in OS X and it worked! Not real sure why but I'll take what I can get.

 

[torpy]

My year old MBP did the same thing. Then I tried a VCD cleaner disk I had lying around (one of those CDs with brushes on it). One spin around inside and it's working perfectly, give it a shot, probably just dust on your laser or something..