Your MacBook Air SuperDrive Won’t Work

The lack of an optical drive in the original MacBook Air was a scandalous omission at the time, with many pundits seeing this as a critical flaw that would doom the new machine’s prospects in the marketplace. Wrong! We’re now several generations into the era of the MacBook Air, and now nobody even mentions the lack of an optical drive, much less grumbles about it. However, an optical drive is still an occasionally useful tool, and the made-for-MacBook Air SuperDrive is an excellent choice. This section presents a couple fixes for some fortunately rare SuperDrive woes.

SuperDrive won’t accept a disc

When you insert a disc into your MacBook Air SuperDrive, it normally grabs the disc and seats it inside the drive. MacBook Air then shows a desktop icon for the drive a few seconds later. However, you may find that your MacBook Air SuperDrive doesn’t accept a disc. That is, even if you insert the disc as far as it will go, the drive doesn’t grab it and no disc icon appears on the desktop.

Although it’s possible the MacBook Air SuperDrive is defective, a much more likely explanation is that the drive is plugged in to a USB hub. Unfortunately, that’s a no-no with the MacBook Air SuperDrive. It needs to be connected directly to MacBook Air’s USB port. The drive gets its electrical power only from that port, not from a USB hub port.

You can’t eject a disc

Few things are as frustrating as a CD or DVD that simply will not eject, whether you press the ...

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