Macbook Not Reading Disc

It's either a bad drive or a bad disk. Do you have another Mac around on which you can try out your MS Office disk?

Also, try some other disc in your MBP. Does that work? If it does, your MS Office disk may have issues. And jokes start here.

If none of that works, then yes, it's probably your optical drive. If you still have warranty, have your friendly Geniuses at the Apple Store help you out.

I just bought the software and tried the same thing. Disc won't read. I tried 2 other discs, and they played perfectly. I guess its back to the store with this pos.

The same has happened to me recently with "MS Office 2011".

At the same time, I had also bought from an Apple Store copies of: "Things" on CD and "iLife 11" on DVD. "iLife 11" installed but "Things" did not - it stalled exactly as the "MS Office 2011" does. I then recalled that I had bought "Bento 3" some months before and that had failed to appear on the desk top when I tried to install it. I got the Bento folk to provide me with an online download on that occasion as I thought the problem was with the disc.

Movies on DVD work just fine.

So it seems that Apple (DVD) installation discs work just fine - but other installation discs (CD and DVD) don't.

I've been reading the threads on the message boards and about the problems with superdrives on MBPs. I'm going to give the compressed air, the disc cleaner, and the resetting the PRAM options ago. I've already reset the permissions using the Disk Utilities - with no effect.

If those fail, I'll be asking the Geniuses at Apple what to do and I hope they will come up with a decent answer why Apple software installs but other companies' software doesn't.

After that the next step will be a request for a refund for "Things" and "MS Office 2011".

I'm having the same problem. The Office 2011 disc just shows up as an empty disk in my MacBook Pro. But the same disc works fine in my iMac and a Mac Mini.

All other DVD's and CD's work fine in the MacBook Pro drive, and so it doesn't seem to be a hardware problem, nor a problem with the DVD!

I have reinstalled OSX 10.6 and am just downloading the combo update to see if this fixes the problem. I've also reset the NVRAM and SMU, again no difference.

I'll keep trying and post a solution (if I find one). Hopefully someone else will post a solution too.

I'm having the same problem with my Mac Pro. I've taken the disc back to the store for a replacement but the replacement does the same thing. Disc won't spin-up and after about 30 seconds, my computer spits it back out.

Seems to be a problem with the compatibility of the discs with the mac drives. Will try downloading using the product key on the box instead.

same thing here. 2010 MacBook Pro 15". My superdrive has no problems with other disks, but keeps ejecting my MS Office 2010 disk. This is happening in bootcamp, by the way.

hahaha, can't believe it.
The answer is....
turn your macbook pro upside down, insert the disk in the superdrive, and it will read it. Once the disc is accepted, you can turn your laptop right-side-up again.
Found this in a different thread about something else, tried it and it worked like a charm.
Better to have solved a problem without understanding it, than understand why a problem can't be solved.

Wow, yeah, it worked. Flipping my macbook upside down and inserting the CD worked. It's fixed. Thanks pggirvin. I read somewhere that I had to reinstall snow leapord and was just about to do that. Thanks for saving me the trouble of not having to do that.

funny, huh?
glad to have helped someone, somewhere.
On to the rest of our digital adventure 🙂

HAHAHA, Indeed!

I've been having problems getting the SuperDrive to accept any commercial DVD disk. I tried the upside-down thing and it worked right away, bang! Rolled on the floor laughing!

Nothing like a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem. Many thanks.

(Still laughing ...)