CD in tray is not recognized -- why?

Question

Level 1

60 points

CD in tray is not recognized -- why?

Hi,

Occasionally, my Mac Pro will not recognize a CD when loaded. It is very intermittent. When this occurs, the disk icon does not appear on the desktop, and the tray will not eject with any of the normal methods. Further the CD does not appear in Disk Utility, and frequently Disk Utility will not open.

Based on other posts, this seems to be a somewhat common problem. I've seen lots of posts on how to get the tray to open.

What I have not seen is WHY this problem is occurring, and what fix(es) to put in place to prevent it from happening again.

Any help in identifying a cure is greatly appreciated.

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)

Posted on May 26, 2016 1:53 PM

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Answer 1

Johnb-one

Level 6

9,180 points

Jul 7, 2016 4:58 PM in response to David Ris

Dunno....all I can do is suggest a few things and hope that works....firstly, try either a cleaning disk with the brushes built in to the disk or a good blast of compressed air. If you have a Mac Pro tower, you can remove the optical drive and open it up, the laser lens inside may be dirty, if that doesn't work, a q-tip and windex might. I don't know how old your drive is, but if it's one of the original Optiarc ones, they do and can go bad occasionally, but are easy to replace. Depending on the age/model of your Mac pro, you could use pretty much any SATA optical drive, or a SATA optical drive with an ATAPI/IDE bridge board plugged into the back. make sure the jumpers on the back (if there are any) are set to cable select, should your drive need to be replaced, also, zap the pram I(well, it 's worth a try, anyways) ...is the cd commercial or is it homemade?

let us know how that turns out

good luck

John B

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Answer 2

David Ris Author

Level 1

60 points

Jun 1, 2016 8:29 AM in response to Johnb-one

JohnB,

My apologies for the delayed response!

Thank you for your suggestion. Interesting that you think it may be a hardware issue, something that I have not really considered. The CDs in question are commercial. I'm old school, still buy my music on CD and add it to iTunes as soon as it arrives.

I have not seen the issue with home made CDs or DVDs (commercial or homemade), but they make up a small percentage of drive usage.

My Mac Pro is a Mid 2012, don't know at this moment which optical drive is installed. I also have the Mac on the floor, which increases the probability of debris in the CD drive.

I will test and get back to you.

-David

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Answer 3

David Ris Author

Level 1

60 points

Jul 7, 2016 4:57 PM in response to David Ris

JohnB,

It took me a few weeks to get through the troubleshooting.

I believe lint in the drive was causing the problem. I attempted to clean out the Superdrive while it was still in the Mac Pro --- thought I had it fixed, only to have it start flaking out again after a couple of weeks.

I was able to do a more thorough cleaning by pulling the drive out of the Mac. It has worked flawlessly since.

Thanks for your help.

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