Tried all those suggestions and remote disk does not appear in finder

I guess you have posted this before, but there is no thread. From the Finder (click on blank desktop to bring up finder) Click finder>preferences>general>show these items, Hard disks, external disks, CD's DVD's...click sidebar and see if they show there as well as the desktop. If not, try double clicking on your HD icon, and they should be shown in the left column under devices. Hope this helps, as I have no idea what you have been advised before. Best of luck

How remote is "Remote"?

On your local LAN is not the same as somewhere across the Internet.

Local LAN is easy, and sanjampet's suggestion makes sense.

If across the Internet, that is a bit more difficult.

Since you are on Snow Leopard, the iCloud "Back-to-My-Mac" is not available to you for across the Internet viability.

Hamachi from LogMeIn.com might allow you to have a VPN connection between across the Internet Macs allowing them to pretend they are on the same local LAN.

If sanjampet and my suggestions do now work for you, then you need to provide us with more information about your network setup, and where the Macs are in relation to each other.

Ah! A remote optical drive, not a HD.

I don't think you can network an optical drive, but I'll defer to anyone who knows better.

AFAIK it needs to be connected directly to the Mac that wants to use it, by firewire or USB.

As noondaywitch says, "Ah! A remote optical drive, not a HD."

You need to download and install "Secrets"

<http://macupdate.com/app/mac/27025/secrets>

It is a System Preferences addition and it will let you set thousands of under the table settings, including making your Macbook Pro beleive it should look for a networked CD/DVD drive, just like the Macbook Air.

WARNING: If you go crazy setting lots of extra stuff via Secrets, take careful notes so you can undo any damage you do, as it is unlikely anyone is going to guess you made changes via "Secrets" 🙂

Once you have installed Secrets, go to System Preferences -> Secrets -> Finder and set

Show remote disks 1 [X]

Show remote disks 2 [X]

You may need to restart the Finder before they take effect. Apple Menu -> Force Quit -> Finder -> Relaunch

As I am NOT in your situation, I cannot test this in advance, so please let us know if it works as suggested.

If that does not work, I did a Google search for "enable mac os x remote dvd" and came up with some alternate ways to enable this feature.

So apple should mention that in the help files, because optical drives often fail and this feature would be essential.

Mac OS X Feedback

<http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html>