El Capitan killed DVD drive

After updating to El Capitan 11.0 - Loss of use of both DVD and Blu-Ray Drive

After updating to El Capitan 11.2 - Initially had use of both drives but then after clicking on the DVD icon in System Preferences no drives would eject their trays. Rebooted and now can only open and close the DVD drive.

Other issues with El Capitan 11.2

No Audio from Safari or DVD Player application though I do get audio from Logic Pro X

CalDigit USB/esata card no longer works - there should be a generic USB-3 driver for all USB-3 cards.

With Mavericks and Yosemite neither the DVD or Blu-Ray Drives would function.

Every device works fine in Snow Leopard.

Solution: Make all updates of Apple Software since the days of Snow Leopard run on Snow Leopard and allow all customers to download Snow Leopard.

I have Snow Leopard 10.6.8, Mavericks, Yosemite, and El Capitan on my Mid Summer 2010 Mac Pro.

I'm having the same problem - Photoshop stopped working on me yesterday (Cs5). I have El Capitan.

I tried to reinstall it from external DVD drive (which has always worked in the past). It goes to initialising and then nothing.

Tried disc on mum's mac (she's got Yosemite) and both the DVD and the DVD player work fine.

HELP please - I rely on photoshop for my work. I have downloaded the CC trial, but I feel cheated that I should have to pay out a monthly subscription when I have the whole Design Suite Premium on disc - and it was expensive to buy and it did work perfectly well!

I agree that Apple may be blocking 3rd party DVD's. But there must be a way around this.

And whoever said "Time for a new computer", well I don't have £2000 for that :-) PLUS, it WAS working absolutely swimmingly before hand!!

I am partitioning my hard drive and installing Yosemite to see if it works... will let you know :-)

Hi Sally,

I had the same problem installing Photoshop CS5 on El Capitan from the Production Premium Install Disk.

Using Snow Leopard I solved the install problem by first copying the whole disk to a non system drive. Then I restarted the computer to run El Capitan. Then I installed Photoshop CS5 from the non system drive itself to the system drive running El Capitan. I haven't tried running the CS5 program to any extent on El Capitan (due to lack of trust) but it does launch and I have been able to draw a little.

Best to partition your system disk and install a different operating system on each partition, then choose which operating system you want to run by continuously holding down the Alt-Option key when you do a hard boot after power down. A menu will appear allowing you to select which OS you want to launch.

On my Mac Pro I have my earlier OS's on a regular spinning drive and El Capitan on a newly purchased an SSD from Samsung mounted on an adapter I purchased from Other World Computing (Macsales.com).

Hope this helps.

After upgrading to El Capitan from Yosemite on an early 2011 15" Macbook Pro, audio CD's and data CD's are no longer readable by the internal optical drive (Superdrive).

When an audio or data disk is inserted, the system responds with the following alert: "THE DISK YOU INSERTED WAS NOT READABLE BY THIS COMPUTER" followed by an IGNORE and EJECT button. After clicking either button, the alert goes away but nothing happens. In order to eject the disk, I have to use the terminal command "drutil eject".

I know the optical drive is not defective because it works fine in a Parallels Windows 10 virtual machine as well as Windows 7 in Bootcamp. I've tried resetting the SMC, PRAM, permissions, and applied the <string>mbasd=1</string> technique but nothing has changed.

It's beyond frustrating that the only way to play a CD using iTunes on my Macbook is by using Windows!!

I have spent countless hours with Apple "Support" over this problem. Initially I upgraded my 2011 MAcBook Pro to OS X Yosemite and encountered the problem. I had never had trouble playing DVDs before the update. Whenever I pressed DVD player it asked me the region of the DVD. I put in Region 1, as soon as I did that the DVD player disappeared.

I deleted the faulty DVD player app and tried to download a new one from the App store. The dvd player app that is downloadable would not work with this operating system and computer. I couldn't install it. I phoned apple support and they told me to upgrade to OS X El Capitan. This process (not including all the time I spent on the line with them) took three hours. Once the operating system was upgraded... guess what, same problem, it asks for the region again and then when you put in the region the DVD Player disappears. All I want the computer to do is what it originally did in 2011. I don't need all the bells and whistles. Apple support has been next to useless, promising to call me back, and not calling back, giving me email addresses to contact, which I then did, and then no one returning my email.

On Apple chat, after all this they told me to go to a "genius" at the Apple Store. This kind of performance and crappy service is so frustrating and unproffesional. I tried downloading SPlayer and Player X, two third party developer apps that claim to be able to play DVDs but none of them worked after I spent $25 on them! I was eventually forced to buy a portable DVD player. Why can't an expensive computer like this do something an ultra cheap ASUS or some other PC knockoff can do? I am never buying another Apple computer again after this.

Same Problem here. Upgraded to El Capitan, latest build, and the Superdrive in my 2010 mac mini stopped working. Just won't accept any discs. Tried everything suggested on this forum. Nothing has worked.

I've gone back to Yosemite and everything is working fine again now :-) Did you back up with time machine while you had Yosemite? I took mine back to a year and a half ago. If you don't have a back up then if you did download Yosemite, then you will still have it in your 'purchases' in your app store.

Good Luck!

Last night I partitioned my drive and clean installed El Capitan in the new partition. My internal superdrive works perfectly in the clean El Cap partition. I'll reinstall my apps and move data to the clean install and hopefully all will be well. I suspect that either the upgrade process and/or a buggy app caused the superdrive breakdown in the updated version of El Capitan.

I thought this was a good idea. I already have a partition, but it already has El Capitan on it. I downloaded Yosemite, but I get a message that the application is too old to be opened on this version of OSX.

I do not have a Time Machine Backup . How can I go about making the partition revert to Yosemite?

If you create a Yosemite Installer on a flash drive or external drive you'll be able to boot to the Yosemite installer (by holding down the option key when powering up). Then you will be able to install Yosemite to your new partition. Here is an article describing how to make a bootable Yosemite install disk: http://www.macworld.com/article/2367748/os-x/how-to-make-a-bootable-os-x-10-10-y osemite-install-drive.html

All,

These suggestions of partitioning drives and re-installing Yosemite are all well and good.... however, some of us are just users, not experts. I am hoping someone from Apple reads these forums (as they are the official forums) for those of us who are standard users who had a 100% stock machine, that worked perfectly and now, after an official Apple upgrade, through the official Apple process, have a machine that doesn't work.

For what it is worth I have exactly the same problems as listed in this thread. I have an iMac i3 3.06 with built in superdrive. Since my upgrade to EC I have not been able to play a DVD at all, CD's play fine. At first I thought the internal drive had died so got hold of a third party drive. This also does not read DVD's. I am trying to brand new DVD films that I have purchased.

I tried using the USB DVD drive on my macbook pro retina (2013) and had exactly the same issue. Surely now we are up to 10.11.3 Apple must now about the issue?

Has anybody had any straight forward fix yet?

Thanks

I tried this solution I saw on YouTube and it worked for me. Here is the screen capture.

When you you reboot holding Cmd-R you must hold it until it actually boots into the Recovery Environment. Be patient as it takes 1-2 minutes.

When you open the Terminal application the prompt you see is unique to your Mac and the account you set up with Apple when you installed El Capitan.

After typing in csrutil disable at the command prompt and then rebooting, all my devices that didn't work were restored to normal function like when they were working well under Snow Leopard, including the added Pioneer BDR-209D Blu-Ray, the Caldigit Fasta 6GU3 for USB-3 (which Caldigit says they don't have the driver for El Capitan and that you have to upgrade to a newer card), M-Audio Midisport 4X4, and the oldest legacy MOTU 896. When I run Final Cut Pro X latest version doing the lessons from Lynda.com the program seems to be behaving normally so far.

When in the Terminal Application I then typed csrutil enable and even now I am still able to use all my devices. So far so good for at least a week now. I don't have to retype csrutil disable anymore.

It appears the nightmare was due to improper initialization as is common to breaking in new software. The csrutil command seemed to set the initialization correctly.

Hope this helps.

Jim

How/where did you find this solution? I'd like to try it, if you wouldn't mind sharing. I have a 2015 Macbook Pro and have always used third-party external dvd drives without a problem..until I ugraded to EC. Now I have no idea where to begin trying to make it work.. but this sounds like it's worth a valiant effort. Otherwise I'll just do what that other person did and downgrade to Yosemite.