I was a PC tech support person for several years and have used this method to clean many drives (even floppy drives way back when!). Many other techs I’ve worked with think it’s useless, but it’s always worked for me, and I’m glad to see it works just as well on the Mac’s superdrive.

Note to anyone considering opening the case to get to the drive:
check out http://www.ifixit.com/

They have really good instructions, step by step, for repairing and replacing all kinds of Mac stuff, including the optical drives. I printed out their instructions to replace the hard drive on my MacBook Pro original core duo. I even taped the screws to their appropriate location in the instructions for putting everything back. It worked out wonderfully!

Rod, good points on other problems causing the drive not to work. I ruled some of those other things out before going to the Lens Cleaner.

Mike and Jose, I am very glad I could be of assistance.

The same problem with a Macbook Pro 2,2 Ghz… A few months before I replaced the motherboard because a defective GPU from nvidia, luckly that service cost nothing because Apple reconized the problem. And suddenly the superdrive stop working… really, my feelings about Apple rapidly change, turning from unconditional love to outrageous hate.

And finally, found this solution…

Well, I love my Macbook again.

I’ve been using cleaning discs in our own Macs with slot load drives for many years now (from the iMac G3 slot loader onwards). I’ve never had a problem with them, and the drives on a succession of iMacs from G3 to G5, iBooks, PowerBooks, MB’s and MBPs are all , without exception, still running fine as a result. The trick is to use them as soon as a problem becomes evident on one of the “harder” tasks for the drive, such as burning a dual layer DVD (or reading a Snow Leopard dual Layer data disc! ) , rather than waiting until things are so bad that you can’t even see an audio CD!

An excellent tip from Kevan Craft, too, for those whose computers are out of warranty and AppleCare, if the simple “disc cleaning disc” approach doesn’t do the job because the drive’s lense has got too grubby to even recognising the cleaning disc at all, or if it can’t remove the gunge after a couple of runs through.

I’ve never had to do this myself, and I’d been scared off suggesting it to others by worry about removing the cover of the drive until today, when a poster, sylven, on the Apple discussion boards indicated that he had done just this. ( see http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10575636#10575636 ) In fact I only found this blog as a result of searching for posts from others who had tried the same thing!

There are other things that can stop a superdrive from working properly , of course. Another serious issue when trying to burn DVD discs if you don’t have masses of free space on your drive can be HD free space fragmentation (always try to keep at least 10%, and preferably 20% of your HD free, even in these days of large drives, and if your drive is not so large you may need as much as 16 to 20 gig free to burn a dual layer DVD even if it isn’t fragmented) , bad media accounts for more such issues, and sometimes drives just fail altogether, but, like Joel and Kevan, I reckon a very large number of the problems experienced on slot loading drives in MBP’s , iMacs, and the like are simply down to dirty lenses. Yep, you can replace your drive in such situations, and the problem will be fixed , but doing so is going to cost you time (while the drive is replaced under warranty or AppleCare) or money, or both.

The suggestions here (running a cleaning disc, and if that doesn’t do the job and your warranty has expired, cleaning the disc directly if you have the confidence to do so) make a heck of a lot of sense.

Cheers

Rod

I tried everything from spraying air into the drive, a DVD Lense Cleaner Disc, Power resets and even banging the case. I’ve even flashed the DVD Drive but still couldn’t get the MacBook Pro to read either CD or DVD media blank or recorded or commecial discs.

Finally, before I jumped to buy a new drive I decided to buy a set of Torx screwdrivers containing a T-6 Torx driver so I could disassemble my MacBook Pro and remove the Matshita DVD-R UJ-867 drive.

I eventually removed the drive and removed the screws opening the actual drive to reveal the DVD-R drive contents inside. Once open I sprayed the optical lense with a can of compressed air and cleaned any dust on the lense and the rest of the inside of the drive. After that I replaced the DVD-R cover and replaced the screws. I then replaced the DVD-R drive back into the MacBook Pro and screwed it all back together.

Once I’d put it all back together I then powered the MacBook Pro up, booted the machine and inserted a music CD THE BEST OF BILL WITHERS and low and behold the CD disc mounted.

So stripping the DVD-R drive and spraying compressed air directly onto the optical lense removed the problem of not being able to load either CD or DVD discs. Now I can read any disc possible and the fix has returned the Matshita DVD-R UJ-867 drive so it now reads both CD and DVD discs as before..

The process is a fiddly but worth the effort. It is my guess that 99 per cent of Superdrive problems experienced by Apple MacBook Pro users using this hardware cleaning method will return their Superdrives to working state so they should be able to read and mount both CD and DVD media..

Job is a good one..

Regards

Kevan

P.S. post this on any and all MacBook Pro forums and blos as possible so other MacBook Pro owners can use the fix to repair their DVD-R Superdrive problem no being able to read and mount CD and DVD media.. Do what I did above and you’ll get your drive back without having to buy a new drive.. If your MacBook Pro is under warranty with Applecare then go to Apple. If the warranty has expired use my fix to repair your Superdrive..