I recently purchased a used late 2009 Mac Mini that works great except the optical drive does not read any CD's/ DVD's I have fed into it. I hooked up an external USB drive which reads hem fine, but is not bootable, in case I ever need to reinstall my OS.
Can anyone provide a model # of a reasonability priced internal slot load CD/ DVD reader- writer that is also Mac bootable?
Mac mini, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2), 2.53 GHZ, 4 GB RAM/ 320 GB HD
Install the OS X you want onto a thumb drive as a bootable device. Cheaper and easier
There should be a compatible replacement superdrive-like optical drive
among those listed for Apple Mac Mini from OWC macsales site online.
They also appear to have several other upgrade & replacement parts...
An instruction video (free) can be seen on the bottom of their pages
on how to install optical and hard drives. Or use online iFixit guides.
About USB flash or externalHDD, be sure the HDD or SSD is formatted
to use with GUID and HFS+ Journaled; there may be other details that
need to be readfor these to work. External USB optical drives can be
used with bootable system discs, be sure to check retail seller returns
policy when you get some brand such as LG or other, so you may return
the unit should it not work out for your purposes. Some won't boot OS X.
Good luck & happy computing! 🙂
I would get an external optical drive. Get one that has it own power supply vice being powered by the USB buss since with a USB powered drive you will like have to use 2 USB ports on the Mac. That is what I had to do with my late 2009 Mini.
I installed a sedct drive when the optical drive was using OWC's data doubler.
Replacement optical drive for late 2009 Mini
