External CD drive / device not recognised by MacBook Air

Hi

Thank you for your response.

I will try and answer your questions.

The cable is fixed so I am unable to use a different cable

My mac is MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2012) Processor 1.8 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 Memory 4GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Graphics Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

I presume the optical drive is the external cd device that I am trying to use? It is OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5630A. This information is is in the System Information under Disc burning as you suggested. Earlier on today it stated there was no device!

I do not have an optical cleaning disc

I got stuck on resetting SMC and NVRAM and PRAM - I do not know whether I have a T2 chip and didn't fully understand the instructions.

I have tried holding down the four keys suggested in the instructions but the laptop started up as normal, so not sure whether I was doing this correctly.

I've tried looking for the device in finder and launchpad but it is still not showing as being connected. I put a cd in the device and it whirred around and then ejected.

Thanks

I've tried resetting the SMC and NVRAM but the only change is Quicktime Player appears at startup. The system is still showing cd/dvd and disc burning is showing OPTIARC dvd etc is attached, but no external devices showing and optical drive is still ejecting cd's.

Either similar age to my laptop or it could be older as it was given to me by a friend when I bought the laptop (second hand but already a year old)

No as I do not have access to another Mac - I tried it on a Chromebook but it did not work at all.