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

uglitangelo, welcome to the forums.

If your warranty has just run out in the last couple of days contact Apple immediately. It is quite likely that they will give you a couple of days grace in such situations.

If they won't, however, do try a cleaning disc. Cleaning the drive fixes a very substantial proportion of problems with these drives.

Cheers

Rod

Tom,

If you look through the posts here you will see that quite a variety of computer models are discussed in it - a variety of MBPs, iMacs, MBs , Mac Pros etc etc . These all have very different logic boards, of course - even the various MBPs differ substantially in this regard, and it would be extremely improbable that they all suffered from the same defect. Unfortunately you don't actually say which particular model of MBP you have, making it almost impossible to to work out which computers you believe your comments / experiences apply to.

In most cases, of course, the problem responds to cleaning, or, at the worst, replacement of the drive itself. In no case that I have seen , other than your own, is there any suggestion that a logicboard issue is involved.

Under such circumstances don't you think it is a bit premature to be making suggestions about "petitions" about logic boards or advising people to buy other particular hardware components???? !

Cheers

Rod

Honestly Rod, I don't think it's really advice I'm giving but I did see a great many here whereas, including myself, the replacement of the drive did not work, nor did cleaning.

I have to say, that for so many to have a single source of failure, this being the superdrive, is a bit stunning and just too many to be a co-wink-a-****.

That being said, I did NOT know they were all different models and I do agree that yes, they would contain different logic boards. Or do they really?

Mine is a All aluim. 17" MBP 2.33Ghz.

The replacement of both drive and ribbon did not help the bench guys at Apple store so they did in fact confirm it is the logic board but whom here knows how to test for that? If a cleaning does not help, nor the replacement of the ribbon cord or drive, it's the logic board. And I've seen a number of posts here where that applies. I'm not too worried about it but it's really too many here.
Thx
Tom

It is actually a perennial problem with optical drives of all kinds, in all kinds of computers, Tom. If you try a google on "Thinkpad Optical Drive Problems", for example, you get 100 million hits. It is probably the most likely component on any notebook computer to run into problems regardless of brand, which is not surprising when you think about what is involved in the medium - spinning a hunk of mass produced plastic at very high speeds (often in excess of those attained by the platters in precision manufactured, enclosed, hard drives) in an "open to the air" environment, while trying to read or write data at high rates through an exposed lens!

Cheers

Rod

That does make a lot of sence Rod.
Thanks
Tom

I completely agree that cleaning drives doesn't solve all of these problems, Gryff, but it does solve a lot of them.

There is an "endemic" problem with ALL optical drives, not just Apple slot loading ones, as you will see if you look around forums dealing with any other brand of notebook computer.

For what its worth we have four heavily used Apple notebooks (ranging from the very first model of MB to a current MBP) and an iMac G5 2005 with slot loading drives in this household currently and have had other slot loading PBs, iMacs etc in the past. Not one of these drives has caused problems (even one in an iMac G3 CRT machine from summer 2000 is still running). I put this down largely to the simple fact that I regularly clean the drives (once a month or at the very first sign of any issue with burning or reading). I know that once they get to the point where they won't write a disc they can be much harder to sort out (though I've managed to get other people's running again by repeated cleaning when they were about to go out and buy a new drive even when they could no longer read a CD reliably).

But as you say, dirt is not the only issue. Optical drives are finicky, optico-mechanical devices . There are, indeed, plenty of things that can go wrong with them!

Cheers

Rod

Have the same problem as everyone. Optical drive just spits out the CDs/DVDs. Im on AppleCare but working in one of the central Asian countries, where there is no apple support, and it's extremely hard to find a new optical drive that costs almost $500. Thank you Apple for causing me this problem.

Agrees, it's killing me to see my MBP often won't read disc. It's $2000 ++, and I worked very hard to get it. Too bad I don't have any other choice than Apple computers.

And have you wandered down to the local DVD shop and bought yourself a DVD cleaner disc for a few rupiah / pul / Rupee / Dinar etc etc, kob?

I know what it is like. I live in a mud brick house with a bunch of smokers and spend of a lot of time in the Australian outback in desert Aboriginal communities. It isn't friendly to optical drives, but it can be remarkably easy to fix with a bit of a clean in many cases.

Cheers

Rod

Price is no factor here, fekimoki. Even those more expensive Sony units suffer from just the same problems when it comes to optical drives , I'm afraid.

Cheers

Rod

yeah fixed it....hardware faults in spindle unit of gsa-s10n. too thin and mbp was made as thin as they could, cool but impacted superdrives. you must perform hardware mods to the drive. Mine now recognises all discs thrown at it, even scratched ones, burned dvd 9 and 5 (dual and single layers) r and rw makes no differecne, itunes rips audio soo fast now. email me if you want more info.

solved it hardware issue see my last post, email me if you want to know more

Trying cleaner was my frist step, unfortunately it didn't work. Tried Disk Utilities and so on. Thanks for tha advice though.

AppleCare replaced my faulty superdrive. But I am still interested in how you fixed your problem.