El Capitan killed DVD drive

DO both resets 2-3 times back to back with no peripherals attached.

This hint worked for me, twice, but it requires delicacy. And sticking things into your superdrive can cause irreparable damage to your drive. That said:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120210114733216

Try the suggestion poikkeus1's link provides and let us know if that helped. If it did not then its very possible your SuperDrive has failed. If you use it frequently then I would recommend getting an external drive (contact OWC at www.macsales.com they have many you can choose from) rather than getting your internal one fixed.

I have seen occurrences of when users are upgrading their OS that hardware fails at the same time, it's rare but it does happen. It's a coincidence but it happens.

Clean your superdrive with a drive cleaner disc.

More or less the same problem here. After EC upgrade, I inserted a CD into the superdrive slot on my 15" MB Pro (Late 2011), and the disc did not read (spinning sound notwithstanding). The disc cannot be ejected either. Im staying calm and waiting for an update.

El Capi killed my DVD. Every time I put in a movie it responds with "Skipping Damaged areas" and doesn't play. I use an LG external drive on my Macbook Air 13 inch, 2015 edition. I've not had a problem before but since I upgraded to El Capi it's refused to play. Even tried running VLC . . . nothing!

Same here. I have a (3 months old) third party DVD drive in my cMP 5,1 that worked fine with Yosemite.

With EC sometimes the drive is there and sometimes it's not (after booting up). It also happens that it disappears out of the blue: When (if) EC has recognized the DVD after boot it happens that (after a while) a message box shows up stating I have inserted an empty DVD (what I did not). After that the DVD drive is gone. System information says there is no DVD drive installed.

Drive is almost new, cables are fine, no problems at all with Yosemite. It's an EC issue after all.

I have virtually the identical machine, except mine shows 3.06 core 3 and I have 12 GB of RAM, and Also have El Capitan and the super drive functions normally. I hadn't actually tried it till I saw your post but 2 separate disks ran fine. I notice that it does not appear in finder till a disk is mounted in the drive. However, if you go to the Apple menu, about this Mac and click the storage tab it should appear there.

Has there been a resolution to this problem? I just installed El Capitan today and guess what, the optical dvd drive no longer recognizes discs. Exactly as described above.

rkaufmann87Oct 6, 2015 12:52 PM Re: El Capitan killed DVD drive
Re: El Capitan killed DVD drivein response to Lee Dunkelberg

Lee please quit the ranting, El Capitan did not do anything to your SuperDrive nor is the issue widespread, . . . Until then please a SMC and PRAM reset, you may need to do these 2-3 times. Instructions are in iMac SMC and PRAM reset

rkaufmann87 I don't think you know what you're talking about. There are hundreds of complaints about El Capi and DVD drives & the fact that you haven't heard about them is more a sign of your lack of information than of Lee's ranting. SMC and PRAM reset don't help. Many have suggested PRAM to no effect. Hopefully Apple will give us a patch soon enough, or someone tell me how to go back to Yosemite.

I'm gonna go with "What is not a coincidence?" Alex, for $200.... Too many others reporting the same issue, at least 4 on this thread alone. However, thanks for the suggestion but it did not correct the problem.

Just to be clear, it worked perfectly prior to the install of El Capitan this morning. How new is your system? Perhaps it's just an issue with older systems? I certainly have no issue replacing it if it has failed and it I won't rule that out, but it does seem to coincidental considering how many here have reported the problem.

Thanks.

Before you conclude that El Capitan killed your DVD drive, try each of the following options - and report here with your results, good or bad. At least future users will know where to look - or not to look. These suggestions are progressive, so you should try each of them serially.

1. Reboot your system. (Probably won't work, but it's worth a try.)

2. SMC and PRAM reset - at least three times each. (It can take a few times for the procedure to work.)

3. Get updates for your burning software. (Some burning software was disabled after the recent Apple security update.)

4. Wait for a patch from Apple. (Apple will come up with an update, hopefully soon.)

5. Put a card into the Superdrive slot. (http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/11/use-this-clever-way-to-clean-a-macs-superdriv e/)

Here is an interesting update. I spoke with Apple Care and they of course had no idea there was any problem, but the nice girl suggested I reinstall El Capitan just in case there was some corrupt part of the install. So, i downloaded a fresh version and reinstalled to find out there was not a single change to my issue. The scheduled call back from Apple Care with another guy, also had him baffled. I told him the Snow Leopard disc worked fine when I was reinstalling the OS after the hard drive replacement. The two different discs, actually, 3 discs I tried were all Microsoft related, Office for Mac 2011 and Windows 7 for installing on VMWare. Well, I decide to jam the Snow Leopard disc in for grins and shazam, it works! Then I grab a dvd movie, Catch Me if you Can and it works too! It turns out that El Capitan is apparently allergic to my Microsoft discs... go figure. So, now I am downloading versions that I need to install off of a USB flash drive...

So, it is apparently related to the El Capitan update, but seems only affected, at least in my case by MS software.

Good detective work. Maybe other users with MS software might have a similar issue. This suggests that a patch/update might be the best solution....