I have an HP Model dvd1170e external drive. It is a USB drive powered by an AC adapter. It is far from new but worked fine the last time I had it hooked to my iMac which was July of this year. In fact I had it continuously hooked up until then. This week, when I tried to hook it up and use it, it is not recognized by the OS. The drive will open and close but the disc is not recognized in Finder whether blank or written. Disc Utility.app does not see the drive either although it used to. I looked in About this Mac>more info>system report>USB and do not see the drive. I have also reset my USB slots by turning off and unplugging the power cord. (I have had to do this in the past as the bus seems to sometimes loose the card reader slot.) I am running 10.7.5 (11G63) Kernel version: Darwin 11.4.2 and I fear that my latest minor upgrade (10.7.4 to 10.7.5 perhaps) may have been since the last time the drive was installed and working in July and this week.
I also took the ODD to a repair shop to have it checked out. I am in Vietnam so communication is limited but basically, the technician plugged it into a Windows 7 laptop and it read the installed disc just fine. He plugged it into a Macbook which I think was running ML. On the Macbook I could not see all that was going on (it seemed to be the personal property of another technician) but it seemed he could open a Finder window for the drive but it had a bar that read something like "Connection error" and none of the files on the CD we had inserted were listed in the window.
It seems to me the problem is not with the drive but with the Mac OSX, specifically the currently installed version. Again, it worked fine with Windows 7 and it worked with whatever my version was back in July.
Could this be an insidious plan on Apple's part to force me to buy their overpriced external superdrive.
I posted this problem in Apple Communities but am getting some looks but no feedback there. Hopefully someone here has some insight.
I also took the ODD to a repair shop to have it checked out. I am in Vietnam so communication is limited but basically, the technician plugged it into a Windows 7 laptop and it read the installed disc just fine. He plugged it into a Macbook which I think was running ML. On the Macbook I could not see all that was going on (it seemed to be the personal property of another technician) but it seemed he could open a Finder window for the drive but it had a bar that read something like "Connection error" and none of the files on the CD we had inserted were listed in the window.
It seems to me the problem is not with the drive but with the Mac OSX, specifically the currently installed version. Again, it worked fine with Windows 7 and it worked with whatever my version was back in July.
Could this be an insidious plan on Apple's part to force me to buy their overpriced external superdrive.
I posted this problem in Apple Communities but am getting some looks but no feedback there. Hopefully someone here has some insight.