Q: El Capitan killed DVD drive

Just wanted to say the csrutil disable solution also worked for me. mid 2011 macbook air with a coolead blu ray external drive

Ah duh, the issue is widespread, and constant, and I'm getting so tired of dealing with this quarterly disappearance of my internal DVD drive on my early 2009 iMac.  It has been an issue for my machine for 4-5 years now.  Reset this, unplug that, reinstall - try that one with no drive - push D, push Option-D, blah blah blah. Oh to have my clamshell back again. I don't know why I'm so stubborn, I should just go buy an external DVD drive - goodness knows if I buy a new iMac I'm going to have to do that anyway, since Ma Apple has banished them internally.  Oh, and while I'm 'ranting", I'm down-grading my cloud storage, because iCloud's proprietary system doesn't allow me to back up my WordPress site to storage there, which, come to think of it, I wouldn't want, anyway, as I am just recovering from the hostage crisis that is iCloud Photos storage.  Maybe it's time to rethink this whole Apple cult/brand loyalty thing overall.  It was a fine affair but now it's over.

I wanted to do this but found out that the external Apple SuperDrive is restricted to 2012 and later Macs and will not work with a mid 2011 iMac or earlier. Furthermore, the external SuperDrive will not work if there is an internal SuperDrive installed. I'll have to replace the drive at the cost of parts and labor since my AppleCare has run out.

Mine is an internal drive on an iMac...also now unrecognized after El Capitan upgrade.

My built in optical drive seemed to disappear when I installed el Capitan on my 2011 MBP 15" - I reset the SMC and found that the drive now appears, mounts and works OK once I have inserted a disc.  Prior to that there's no sign of it and "system report" still doesn't show the hardware... but when I insert a disc it mounts and suddenly the drive appears in diskutil.  Once I eject the disk the whole drive disappears again.

Hi, I am by no means any sort of expert either, and I am not sure if you found way to resolve your problem yet...but I tried something that worked for me yesterday.

I have a mid-2010 MBP and after a recent clean install of Yosemite I could not play DVD/CD on the internal drive---the same issue many others have complained of... I carefully tried some of the things listed on this thread, and nothing worked. Then I looked at another thread from 2014 where someone recommended the following advice which I am posting below. I did not do the SMC reset, however. I just shut down and with restart I held down the C key. the inserted DVD ejected few times but i kept reinserting it---At some point the DVD drive started working and the disc mounted.  Not sure if it is a permanent fix but it worked for me, too. Inserting an audio CD opens iTunes and works fine, as well.

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  justin_bDec 6, 2014 4:39 AM Re: optical drive not working after upgrade to yosemite
  in response to Michael Dixon2

  I had exactly this and I've just managed to get it working again. No promises, but here's what I did. I put a DVD in (if not already not already one there) and pushed it gently but as far as it would go (not forcing it, just pushing it past the opening using a bit of card) - it wouldn't grab it though but I left it sat there. I did the shutdown and did the SMC reset (power cord out for a couple of minutes) then restarted. Shutdown again and whilst starting up told the Mac to boot from the CD drive (holding C down on keyboard straight after turning on and kept it held during startup). The drive whirred a bit after about 10 seconds.  When it showed the start up progress bar and sounded like it was starting up from the hard disk, I took finger off the C key and moved to holding down the eject button on the keyboard. Finally after about 30 secs or so, the eject icon appeared on the screen and after a few more seconds the DVD popped out. Putting it back in it grabbed it happily and is reading it fine. Don't know if this will help you too - but just in case.

  This helped me 2 members found this helpful (2)

   

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  Level 1  MoJoRoDec 30, 2014 8:22 AM Re: optical drive not working after upgrade to yosemite
  in response to justin_b

  Wow, don't understand why this worked but it made mine work.  In my case, my drive WOULD pull in the disc, but wouldn't mount; it would sometimes sound like it was spinning the disc slowly, then eject it after a minute.  I had to keep pushing it back in during the boot process when it would spit it out (holding C the whole time), but then my computer spun up the disc for real, and started up with the disc mounted.  Thanks for the tip!

   

I had the same issue but went to youtube and found an answer that worked for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMBLTeXKOV0

click on the link and follow the directions. i copied what he said to type from his post at the bottom and pasted it to

the terminal restarted and **** it worked.

Thanks so much. I just rebooted with the cd/dvd drive connected holding C on the keyboard and my drive is back to life!

Shut down, restarted with C key held down, disc loaded after having just sat there and bounced instead of loading, all seems to work loading and ejecting now, happened after update to El Capitan.

Just a oddball suggestion. I recently had a similar problem after a bunch of hardware upgrades to my Mac Pro. I had NOT changed the OS  (still running 10.8.5) but I started having this problem of the Mac not seeing my two internal Pioneer BluRay writers. Resetting the PRAM etc would solve it, but only for a short while, then those drives would vanish again

Based on a post I found in some obscure forum, I tried un-checking "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" in the energy prefs panel.  Bingo! Problem solved.  It's been 3 weeks now and nothing has disappeared.  (Note that the problem was NOT hard disks vanishing, so I never would have thought to try it except that someone else said it worked for him.)

Can't hurt to try.

Upgraded to OS 10.11 and aftermarket RW DVD device stopped reading Win disks (keeps spinning), and spotty with my older CD / DVD. It's hard to pin point exact causation, but the El Capt. has laundry list of bugs for my 2009 MacPro.

Help! I have been using a samsung portable dvd writer se-218 flawlessly with my Mac mini for over a year. Last weel I updated to the new OS, and now it refuses to burn a disc. The disc just spins inside the drive. You hear it slow, stop,and start again over and over, and then ejecting it takes forever. I tried finding a site to update the driver or firmware, but they only had it for PC. Anyone able to suggest a solution? Thanks.

Thank you Robert! This has worked for me - Brilliant tip resulting in a working player and a huge sigh of relief 

this is now 2016. I have a 27" iMac with and external superdrive that I bought two years ago. I often burn audio CD's of my own music or voiceovers that I share with others 'cause not EVERYBODY wants an MP3 ya know. Every single CD I've tried to burn since upgrading to El Capitan has failed.

I've read posts describing complicated ways to fix this while insisting that this is NOT a real problem.

Well, if so, why are ANY steps required except for the usual ones that always worked so well?

thanks, but tried it and STILL got FAIL when I tried to burn a CD.