SuperDrive Won't Read Discs at all

I had the same oroblem, try cleaning the drive , I could not read music or program CDs and after cleaning the drive with a drive cleaner All my CDs are now readable

I now have some more information which may be of use to others. I have to stress, though, that in order to confirm with more statistical reliability that what I have now observed is not the result of some undetected contingency, I would have had to have spent more time and waste more blank CDs than I can afford.

Quite apart from the old disc of photos that would not open at all, I have been finding that audio CDs that I have burnt myself (using Toast Titanium 7) take a very long time to mount on my Mac; when inserted, the drive makes rhythmic rumbling sounds for up to nearly 2 minutes before settling down and making the disc icon appear on the desktop. In my CD player, however, they play perfectly well and immediately.

I have now discovered that when I last made a data CD, I had left the advanced recorder settings at 'write session' instead of 'write disc'. Now that I have reset this to 'write disc', my burnt audio CDs load and mount normally. I am puzzled by this, because when burning audio CDs (unlike data CDs) it is impossible to burn a session in such a way as to leave the disc 'open' and allow more sessions to be burnt subsequently. So the 'write session' option should have no effect when burning audio CDs. Yet (unless the effect is due to some other, undetected, contingency) it does seem to affect the loading and mounting of audio CDs.

I wonder if anyone has any light to shed on this?

Hello all,

Have any of you heard about the deadly 2.1 firmware update for superdrives in mb & mbp? Apple released it last year and it killed or maimed superdrives of enough folks for Apple to quietly withdraw the update and pretend like it never happened. Look it up. So this may be one of the problems. Now a lot of people are stuck with a broken drive that Apple screwed up and we have to pay for it!

If you have a Lexar Secure II USB drive, check for the LexarFilterScheme.kext file in /System/Library/Extensions. There is a known conflict with this extension and reading DVDs. **Note this the main System folder, not the User System folder.

Delete the file, log out and back in. Try the DVD.

Hope this helps.

Lee

My problem is reading DVD it will read CD's. So if Apple sent out that update,(and destroyed the drive) does that mean we need to get a new combo drive.(mine is a combo drive, is a combo and super drive the same) mine too is the one with a bunch of numbers at the top as mentioned earlier.. It is not a pioneer...
I wanted to do a hardware check however the disk didnt take (of course)...eject..

My early 2008 iMac also has trouble reading discs. The problem is intermittent, does not discriminate on disc type, and it particularly frustrating. I fear this is a widespread hardware issue. I say this only because whenever I have a problem reading a disc, I pop it into my wife's MacBook and it's detected immediately without fail. It's just become a pain-in-the-butt to rip CDs on her machine and then transfer them over to my iTunes library.

Perhaps if enough people report their problem then Apple will do something to right the situation, as this is unacceptable.

I've read all the comments regarding the drives not reading discs. I'm having the same problem, and it is not related to the quality of the discs. The same discs, some of them brand new programs, read just fine on all other computers. This computer, however, will not allow any CD, program or otherwise, to remain in the tray. Whenever a disc is put in the tray, after a few seconds the computer spits the tray back open without reading the disc. It appears as though several people are having the same problem which means there must be a glitch with the drives. None of the responses yet seem to have discovered a solution. I hope someone out there has some info soon. I'll keep checking back to see. In the meantime, I'll keep messing around with it here to see if I can figure out something. This is really an irritating situation as it renders my eMac virtually unusable for anything besides Office work or internet browsing.

replace the DVD drive with a new one witch will cost u around £30/40 uk pounds for a new one
that worked for me and has worked ever since
and now im running osx 10.5.5 leopard on my e-mac