Update (2010.12.30): three days ago I took apart my mom's Mac Mini to replace the hard drive (she outgrew the original 120 GB one). Probably people living in the suburbs are better off regarding the required cleaning frequency of their optical drives. I live close to a road with a pretty high traffic and not too rich vegetation, so a lot of dust is coming into the flat. So it's now quite certain that my drive needs cleaning every 20 months. And since I bought my MBP during Christmas in 2006 (27th of December to be precise), it was 20 months between the date of purchase and the first cleaning. Update (2010.04.04): it happened today for the first time -since I wrote this article- that I could not read a CD with my MBP's superdrive.
I can now read every CD/DVD of mine again and writing works perfectly too. Put it back into the MBP, put the MBP together and test the optical drive's CD/DVD reading and writing capabilities to see if the cleaning had any positive effect. Reassembling the unit should be a piece of cake. It didn't seem risky to take apart so I started the process. After having spent some time with Google, I've stumbled on a discussion thread on Apple's forums that contained a few pics of a slot-loading SuperDrive's internals. Notebook optical drives are a lot smaller and I wanted to see some proof-of-concept photos to get reassurance. I had no difficulties with my old PC's 5.25" Plextor DVD-writer (you just had to remove the screws from the drive's case and take off the upper part and the lens was right there), but I've never taken apart a slot-loading drive. So I was up and ready for cleaning the lens of the MacBook Pro's SuperDrive, however I was a bit unsure about whether there's any gotcha in taking the SuperDrive apart.
the Hi-Fi system and my old PC had problems reading CDs too and a manual cleaning of the lens helped - I tried a lens cleaning kit too, but it was worth nothing). I already had issue with dust on the lens of various CD/DVD drives in the household (eg. Every sign pointed to either a broken optical drive or malfunction due to dusty lens. This was the last drop of water in the glass. However lately I started to have problems even reading my CDs and DVDs.
This was quite strange, but I was still not very suspicious (this is my first Mac and having grown up using PCs with Windows I got used to failures). The burn process started OK, but near the end (or maybe during writing the lead out?) it failed with some mysterious error message. This was not a big deal since it still accepted 9 out of 10 CDs without any problems. System/Library/Caches/ (a directory).The first sign of malfunction was that the MBP started to be picky about what sort of blank CDs/DVDs it would accept for writing. Run Disk Utility and Repair Disk Permissionsĭelete the following configuration file to create a fresh copy ~/Library/Caches (your local Library directory). Both of these files are located in Users > Library > Preferences. You’ll want to delete two files: “ ” and “ ”. Some people have reported successfully fixing Optical CD/DVD Drive on Mac or SuperDrive issues by deleting the Finder’s preference files (don’t worry, the Finder will automatically make new ones). Holding down the Command (Apple), Option, P, and R and then hold the Power button simultaneously, 3 times and wait for 3 loud chimes. Try the following steps and I am sure it will be fixed.Ĭlean the SuperDrive’s slot with compressed gas/vacuum cleaner.