Q: Drive won't read any dvd-ejects it automatically after spinning some time

Have you tried the voodoo cleaning disc fix? If you haven't used the drive for a long time you may need to run the cleaning disc several times.

If that fails then buying a "barebones" tray loading drive and fitting it in a 51/4" enclosure is generally the cheapest alternative.

Cheers

Rod

I have tried a CD laser lens cleaning disc. It worked fine the first time, then the second (and third and fourth and fifth) try, it ejected the disc out pretty quickly without really running. Though I am currently listening to a CD playing just fine, which I tried after the cleaning disc ejected, worried that CDs would no longer play.

Keep on trying the cleaner disc in that case, trellisaze. If the worst comes to the worst there are ways of removing the drive and manually cleaning the drive's lens, though they are riskier than using a cleaning disc, but if a cleaning disc got you running, albeit briefly , you can be fairly certain that a dirty lens is the area where your problem lies.

I've had success myself with cleaning discs used for "standalone" DVD players that you connect to TVs, running them with Apple's own "DVD Player". Others have indicated that the Memorex cleaning discs work well (despite the fact that their burnable DVD's and CDs generally have an awful record on Macs).

If one brand of cleaning disc doesn't work, try a different type /brand. Even buying a couple is way cheaper than changing the drive!

Cheers

Rod

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear - I meant that the cleaning disc ran through it's cleaning process successfully once, but it wouldn't run again when I put it back in the drive a few more times. The drive ejected it every time before it got to run.

However, I have a bit of renewed hope... I just put a different movie DVD in and it mounted and played! I still can't get Snow Leopard to mount though and that's really what I need. So clearly it still works, but only with certain discs.

I've also tried resetting the System Management Controller since I posted earlier as well. I really don't want to have to replace the drive, but this is becoming extremely frustrating. I will try your suggestion and try a different cleaning disc.

The DL Snow Leopard disk is at the upper end of difficulty for reading, I'm afraid, trellisaze. Sounds to me as if you are making some progress, which suggests that the cleaning process is at least getting you somewhere. Certainly worth persisting with for a little longer.

Make sure that the Snow Leopard disc itself is spotless, too. They don't seem to like so much as a single errant finger smudge on them.

Cheers

Rod

Thanks Rod for all of your comments, I really appreciate them.

I will keep trying the cleaning route for a bit before I panic too much.

Update: I ordered a couple of cleaning disks from Amazon. The Memorex disk stayed in the drive and I was able to run through the steps to clean the lens. The other disk wouldn't stay in the drive even after I used the Memorex one.

Anyway, after using the cleaning disk, I tried a commercial movie DVD that I got to work, one time before but wouldn't after that one time. It worked the very first time and I watched about 20 minutes of the movie with no ill effects.

I popped in an older DVD movie and that was just ejected. I will try using the cleaning disk a few more times and keep popping different DVD's in.

I think there are multiple evils going on here. The lens is definitely getting dirty, but I think there is merit in thinking that a software problem is behind all of these failures.
By the way, My Applecare ran out on Dec 4th, go figure.

I don't use the drive much but would like to be able to upgrade the OS since I am still running Tiger.

Man, I've tried everything. I just don't get how it reads cd's (audio/data) but not a brand new commercial movie DVD. Was working totally fine before a few software updates last week. I'm stumped.

There are two different lasers for reading CDs and DVDs. Sounds like one is functioning and the other is not.

I am a first time mac user and my mbp is brand spankin new. I have used my optical drive for importing music to itunes. I only imported 6 cds total over the course of a few weeks.
First the drive was just rejecting music cds. I went to the Genius bar and they sprayed the drive with duster, got one cd to read and sent me home. The drive worked once more after that. And now it won't read dvds, which wasn't a problem before. It does not work at all. Just spins and spits the disk back out. I am very frustrated. _

well, I achived/re-installed snow leopard - and everything is working again. so weird. i suggest everyone try it.

I have clones of 10.5.8 and 10.6.1 which mount CD and DVD fine. It's 10.6.2 which is causing problems.

My Superdrive won't let me insert a disc. When you push it in the slot, you can feel a bit of springiness, but it won't take the disc in. BUT - if you open the Disk Utility app, you can hear a little "eject" noise from the drive and it will then accept the disc and read it fine. Once.

Every time I need to insert a disc, I have to open the Disc Utility app. If it is already open, I have to close it, and reopen it again. Unfortunately, just hitting the eject key doesn't work - only opening the app. So I imagine this has to be a software problem... I've repaired permissions and reset the PRAM, but nothing works except opening Disc Utility every single time.

This started happening just after the warranty ran out, of course.

By the way, this same MacBook Pro also has incredibly noisy cooling fans, when it's cold. Especially the right one. They get quieter once it warms up, but it sounds like a lawnmower at first.

I've been a Mac user for many years, but their stuff is junk these days, and it's just too expensive for this kind of BS and no support from Apple. I won't be buying any more Macs.

HL-DT-ST DVDRW GSA-S10N:

Firmware Revision: AP12
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO
Media: Insert media and refresh to show available burn speeds

The problem doesn't stop with the intern DVD/CD Burner... since i use an extern USB2 burner i could read DVD's and CD's at least on this way. But now for chrismas i wanted to burn some CD's with a Special Ed Program i've made for some presents and what happens? Apple seems to block also to burn CD's on extern machines.

It's not true, that Apple Computer handles CD/DVD Drives as any other systems. Richard Drummond, the famous writer of the C-Compiler DICE and programmer of uae for mac described Apple-Computer behaviour as a "real pig"!, as everyone can read in his manual for compiling the emulator on Mac OS X under the doc/scsi, section, right after he described how to easy configure the devices under linux, BSD-Unixes, and other systems. But read for your own:

-----

Now we get to the real problems. SCSI emulation with E-UAE on OS X is
currently a real pig, due to some features and limitations of OS X. The big
problem is that you need a writable device - a CD or DVD burner - for SCSI
emulation to work at all. This is because the OS X kernel will only let you
send SCSI commands to a writable device (for this problem to be solved, UAE
would need to support a real SCSI emulation - the current implementation is
simply a wrapper around a host SCSI device).

The second problem is that the Finder does not like sharing a removable
media device with any other application. For SCSI emulation to work, you
must start UAE without a disc inserted in your CD or DVD writer. Otherwise,
Finder will auto-mount the disc and not let UAE access the device. A
different (more drastic) solution is to kill OS X's auto-mount daemon, but the
procedure for doing this differs depending on which version of OS X you
have. Somebody remind me to look this up and fill in the details here.

The third problem is getting UAE to locate your CD or DVD writer. libscg on
OS X (the SCSI transport layer which UAE uses) doesn't support bus-scanning
on OS X. Only one device can currently be used with UAE, and you have to
name it explicitly with the 'scsi_device=' option in your config file.

For the first CD writer, this will be:

scsi_device=IOCompactDiscServices/0

For the first DVD writer, this will be

scsi_device=IODVDServices/0

Also remember to add the 'scsi=true' option to your config.

If set up correctly, UAE will output something similar to the following when
starting up:

scsibus:0
0,0,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,1,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,2,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,3,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,4,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,5,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,6,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,7,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,8,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,9,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,10,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,11,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,12,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,13,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,14,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
0,15,0 0 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW842S ' '1.0f' CD-ROM
SCSIDEV: 16 devices found
support_scsi = 1 support_ioctl = 0

and then it'll complain a bit about being unable to get exclusive access and
then it'll say

(0,0,0) = uaescsi.device:0

Okay. Don't look so worried. What's happening here is that UAE is trying to
scan for SCSI devices, can't, and ends up finding the same device 16 times.
Not very elegant, I know, but it works. I will tidy this up eventually. If
Finder has an exclusive lock on your device because it has mounted a disc,
UAE will just say 'Unable to get exclusive access to device' once and say:

SCSIDEV: 0 devices found
---

So, at least three important behaviours are not normal/standard. And I'm still sure that Apple messed around with some firmware or driver specific parts in Mac OS X 10.6 that also from this installation influences the failout of the Devices under Mac OS X 10.4!

Thats really the last Mac i bought. The only thing that kept me to stay with Apple over the last years was, when i watched funny messages and behaviours of Windows-Machines. But now whats enough is enough:

APPLE JUST WORKS?

NO IT DOESN'T!

Cheers and happy chrismas,

tazman

Message was edited by: Tazmandevil

Perhaps you can see the relevance of a post about the problems that the writer of software to emulate an Amiga computer on a Mac had some years ago in getting his emulator software to convince OSX that drives attached to the Mac through PATA, SATA , Firewire, or USB buses were really SCSI devices, to helping people with problems with their superdrives on MBPs today, Tazmandevil, but I'm afraid it escapes me.

I'm certainly no expert in such areas, but it strikes me that there are likely to be some real security and stability issues that would arise if OSX developers made it too easy for third party operators to convince the OS that such devices were something other than they claim to be!

Cheers

Rod