Q: El Capitan killed DVD drive

There sure are a lot of people with the same coincidence.

I also reset the PRAM twice and the SMC, and reinstalled the operating system again, which for some reason had to be done after the second time reseting the PRAM.

I did find that there is a system preference for DVD/CD that needs to be adjusted. But it does not have enough choices. I was able to tell it to open photos for viewing an old DVD I burned with photos and Videos on it. So it recognized and played that.

But the internal drive will not recognize any commercial discs I put in there, even if I manually open the DVD player first.

As others have written, the discs spin for a while, and then get spit out.

Same problem Here. DVD not working after El Capitan upgrade.

I just noticed that CD works fine, but any DVD appears to be unredeable or blank after El Capitan Upgrade.

I am trying to downgrade to Yosemite again and I will post any update.

Did you try a movie dvd? Movie dvd's worked just fine for me, I only had problem with the Microsoft cd's that I tried. Even a work cd worked for me, a quarterly training cd.

Scott

Yes, I tried a Movie DVD as well and same problem.

At this point I can say that All DVDs are affected and all CDs are working.

I found this in an old discussion about a similar issue in Maverick.   I'll try it out when I get home.

I'm not sure which command did the trick so please try running these commands from terminal in the following order.

drutil status

drutil info

drutil getconfig

drutil eject

I tried the commands you mentioned but none of them fixed the problem.

Seems to be commands for testing.

I still have the issue.

Thanks!

.

Macbook Pro 7,1 (13'' Mid 2010)

I'm now running Snow Leopard and my Superdrive is fully functional. I even installed Snow Leopard via DVD, so in my case El Capitan did not kill my superdrive. There may be an issue with the latest software communicating with this hardware, I don't know.

I've since tried to Skype my family and connect a bluetooth device and have noticed that both the built in camera and bluetooth aren't recognised by OS X.
I don't use these often so I can't be certain where to lay blame, all I know is the last time I used them both successfully was with Yosemite.
I hope my logic board isn't on the way out.

Does anyone else have this issue?

same for me on both my Imac and the macbook pro - this seems like it is the operating system not two failed optical drives at the same instant!  Has no one found a solution that actually works?

I still have the issue and no one seems to have come up with a workable solution except to install an older OS.  Is this really the best that apple can come up with?  There is nothing I can find on google to resolve this issue.  Am I the only one?

my problem is not with external optical drives it is with the original apple drive in a iMac 27" and a 15" Maxbook Pro.  Both are original apple macines so that theory seems like a red herring sorry

You were quick to judge on this one. I also upgraded to El Capitan today and my (internal) optical drive stopped working (not whirring very much and spitting the cd out after about 30 seconds). Internal, though, so definitely an Apple product.

I was trying to rip some music CDs I was given for Christmas (i.e. not Microsoft) and it *was actually working* for the first three or four, then stopped working mid-way through ripping another one. It's weird, isn't it, that it worked for a while and then stopped half way through. I've spent hours trying out solutions mentioned here and elsewhere, and so far to no avail.

As much as anything I wanted to log this problem here so that Apple will pay attention, but if anyone has any insights, then please let us know!

Can this be an example of planned obsolescence?  The mid 2010 Mac mini was the last to feature an optical drive.  It came with 10.6.  Now 10.11, 5-1/2 years later, won't recognize optical drives.  FIVE operating system updates, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10,10 and 10.11 have come on Mac minis with no optical drives.  Is it time to replace a five year old computer with a new one?

This is not planned obsolescence. Someone told me he solved the problem by wiping the whole machine and starting over.  What use to be called a clean install of the OS. He called it a "Nuke and Pave". I don't know it that is a real name, or just his name for the process.

But anyway he told me how to do it, but I am not able to do it because I am not experienced enough to understand what I am doing.  And I do not have a physical backup at my home, or a drive that can be used. Nor should I have to do that.

Yes can anyone help - I have just upgraded to El Capitan but now cannot upload or listen to music cds (I have 000s and was slowly uploading them to iTunes - but the cds now whirr around and then get spat out.  If I go to Applications I get the error message: "There was an initialisation error  - A valid DVD drive could not be found [-70012]

Such a pain!!!!