Fix MacBook Pro Optical Drive Problems

Yesterday I was greatly distraught when my MacBook Pro’s superdrive would not accept blank DVD-Rs. When I inserted a blank DVD-R it spun around for a bit, sped up, slowed down, stopped, then spit it back out at me with no error message. It read DVDs, burned CDs, and read CDs fine; but I could not get it to accept a blank DVD-R! I searched around and found information about the MacBook superdrive update which killed alot of people’s optical drives. I couldn’t remember if i installed the update or not, so I was fairly worried because I did not want to drop $400 to fix something which an Apple update broke.

I tried a bunch of tricks to try to get my beloved superdrive to work, but to no avail. Finally while searching around on google someone suggested to get a CD cleaner. I went to Staples and picked one up for $10, put it into my optical drive, and bam it burns DVD-Rs again! I’m guessing the firmware update made the optical drive more sensitive to dust. If your having trouble with your MacBook’s optical drive I suggest grabbing one of these CD drive cleaners and trying your luck before resorting to bringing your computer back to the Apple store.