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!

Funny you bring this up. In April, I got a new power adapter and everything seemed to be working fine. I don’t take my MacBook Pro off the power adapter much at all. When I did the other day, I noticed my computer lasted only like 20 minutes on battery. I lost some work because it just shut down at 65%. I am getting a new battery. I think my lack of cycling the battery, bringing it off the power adapter more often, might have contributed to the battery becoming dysfunctional.

We’ll see. I am going to follow these guidelines every month with my new battery.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490

now the battery is showing 1:22 time to load, but it was on the charger for the whole day. weird.

Did you get any hints of the Apple Store?

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.

The private key option that I think you are talking about is an extra layer of security where you actually provide the encryption key that is used to store your data securely (instead of the common one that Backblaze would use).

Take a look at this:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2008/11/12/how-to-make-strong-encryption-easy-to-use/

Now, my assumption is if you get a DVD or USB drive with your data, there are two ways that they can do it:

1. You have to give them your private key before they send you your data. Your data comes on the DVD or USB drive unencrypted.

2. There is some mechanism on the DVD or USB Drive where your data is encrypted and you can provide your private key to get at your data.

I seem to remember that Backblaze does (1) right now but might be working on a mechanism to do (2). Not sure if they have done that yet.

Maybe someone over there can comment.

I haven’t look into it, I’m just guessing

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