Snow Leopard and External DVD burner

[Kirk]

My Superdrive on my 24" iMac stopped working some time ago. The optical drive just vanished, not showing up in profiler, Disk utility or anything. Then I got it replaced (they actually had to do it twice), but the new one only worked for a couple of days before it stopped working again.

Then I gave up and bought a USB2 Samsung WriteMaster external DVD-burner. It worked well for a long time, but now suddenly my external drive does not appear any longer.

Anyone else got problems with external DVD-burners not showing up when running Snow Leopard 10.6.3?

 

[Makosuke]

Use System Profiler to check the USB bus and see if you're not seeing ANYTHING when it's connected, which would indicate a failed bridge board in the drive (or a bad USB port, but you can test that easily by trying a different device). If you see a bridge board listed, but no drive along with it, then maybe the drive failed--it's like a $25 component, so they tend to have an unsettlingly high failure rate.

Now, if it dropped immediately after installing 10.6.3, maybe there's a connection. If it wasn't immediate, probably just a coincidence, and I'd lean toward hardware failure as the cause.