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Internal Optical Drive not recognized after trying to Bootcamp

Around 3 months ago I tried boot camping my Macbook with Windows 7 but it ended up freezing and I had to restart my computer. When the computer had fully restarted I found that a few things had changed. First, I now had a 70 GB partition called BOOTCAMP but it was basically unusable since the Windows 7 OS was never installed in the partition, and second the Optical Drive wasn't recognized by my computer anymore so it won't work at all and the Windows 7 CD is now stuck in there.


I tried a lot of different ways that I found on the internet to try to eject the CD but nothing has worked. It's not really a huge deal since CDs are starting to become the new floppy disks but it would still be nice to have this working again.


Also, here's the original post that I made back in December. It never got any replies and somehow got moved but I was never able to see where it got moved because whenever I clicked "discussion" in "Branched to a new discussion." I would get a page that said this - "Unauthorized. Access to this place or content is restricted. If you think this is a mistake, please contact your administrator or the person who directed you here." I know the whole post is pretty long so I have a TLDR; at the end of it and I pretty much summarized the problem again at the top of this whole post.


Alright so earlier today I decided to Bootcamp my Macbook and install Windows 7 with a 70GB partition. I was using https://help.apple.com/bootcamp/mac/5.0/help/#/bcmp173b3bf2 and http://www.howtogeek.com/186907/how-to-install-windows-on-a-mac-with-boot-camp/ to help guide me through the process. Everything was running smoothly at first...I had a 32GB memory stick that I used to load the support software onto and I had a Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit DVD in my disk drive.


The first problem I ran into was when Bootcamp wanted to download the files onto the memory stick - it wanted me to format the stick. So I went into Disk Utility, clicked on it, went to erase, then formatted it to the same format it was (because it was already FAT) and then it all worked. After getting the support software onto the memory stick the next step was to partition my disk. After doing a TON of research I finally decided that 70GB would be enough for the OS, a game or two, Sony Vegas Pro, and a few small programs. So I dragged the thing to give the new partition 70 GB and pressed install.


Then, the next problem occurred - a message popped up saying "The USB drive connected to this Mac contains a bootable volume. In order to install Windows 7 from the DVD, the Boot Camp Assistant needs to disable this functionality. No information on the drive will be removed, do you want to continue?" I was hesitant at this point to do anything so I googled it and couldn't find much except this thread - Bootable volume on USB flash drive in boot camp. I decided to try it and press continue since according to the thread it would stop me if there was a problem. Once I did I THINK (I can't remember that it did for sure or not) it dismounted the memory stick, which I remember thinking was okay because I could just unplug it and plug it back in after Windows 7 was installed to install the support software (Also, I NEVER removed the memory stick until after a reboot later on). After that Bootcamp began partitioning my hard drive.


About an hour later the blue progress bar had actually filled up to at least 99% (but it looked like 100% to me) but Bootcamp still said "Status: Partitioning Disk" so I left it alone for another 1-2 hours. After that I started getting worried and googled how long this process was supposed to take and found out that this step normally only took a few minutes for most people. At this point I started looking up fixes for this but nothing matched my problem since Bootcamp itself wasn't actually frozen (when I clicked and held on the icon it didn't say "Application not responding") so I decided to check to see if the partition had worked. Then, Disk Utility froze like a few seconds after opening it up so I had to force quit that. My next option was to check under "Storage" in "About this mac" so I tried that and it froze as well. While all this was going on I kept checking back to Bootcamp and it never froze.


Now I was getting extremely worried and with no solutions on Google and no idea what to do I decided to just try and restart my computer and pray to god that it would reboot fine. Luckily, it did...for the most part. After rebooting all my applications seemed to be working fine (I can confirm that Terminal, Disk Utility, System Preferences, System Information, and Safari are all working or at least loading). I also had all my files still on my computer so that was good. Next, I checked Disk Utility to see if the partition had actually worked and it did, or at least it is showing up as "BOOTCAMP" under my main hard drive. Then, I tried using Bootcamp again and this is when I noticed something new - a warning on Bootcamp's first page that wasn't there before, "You need an optical drive to install Windows. Connect an optical drive to your computer. You cannot install Windows with a remote optical drive." I can't guarantee that it wasn't there the first time but I really don't remember it there. After reading that I checked my Desktop for the mounted Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit DVD and it wasn't there. Then, I checked Disk Utility and it wasn't showing up there either. The only things I can see on Disk Utility are my main hard drive with both partitions, my memory stick, and a random dmg file called decryptedFile.dmg (the size of this file is only 15.6mb so I don't think it could be the OS DVD).

So now I am trying to figure out how to get my computer to recognize that it does have an internal optical drive and that there is a DVD inside of it. I looked around on Google to try to find answers but all the regular options to fix this don't work since the computer itself is not realizing it's there. I don't know if this helps to prove that it doesn't realize this but I checked in System Information -> Hardware -> Disk Burning and it says "No disk burning device was found. If the device is external, make sure it's connected and turned on." And since a "Superdrive" can read disks I'm assuming it can burn them to and would be shown under that. (I don't know that much about computers though so I could easily be wrong)

Anyways, sorry for the extreme detail that I went into but I wanted to get as much information about what happened as I possibly could. For those of you who don't have time to read all that I'll put a little summary.

TLDR; Basically, I tried to Bootcamp my Macbook to run Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. I ran into a few problems and then Bootcamp wouldn't move on from "Status: Partitioning Disk" so I had to restart my computer. After the restart my Macbook doesn't recognize that it has an internal Superdrive and therefore doesn't realize that there's a Windows 7 Ultimate DVD disk in it. I looked around for answers but none of the simple ones (using key commands on the keyboard and typing something into terminal) worked. Now I'm looking for help to get my computer to realize that it does have a Superdrive inside so I can get the disk out.

Thanks in advanced! If any more information is required to help please let me know so I can find it. Also, this is a Mid-2010 White Unibody Macbook.

MacBook (13-inch Mid 2010), OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)

Posted on Mar 29, 2015 10:57 AM

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Internal Optical Drive not recognized after trying to Bootcamp

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