Macbook Pro 13- How to tell if Superdrive has failed?

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I got a brand new Macbook Pro 13 for my birthday in May 2010 (2.66 C2D, 320 HDD,4 GB DDR3 1067). Recently, I updated to Lion and am 10.7.2 after a completely clean erase & install.

I've had no problems with my laptop until yesterday. I tried to burn a CD, and nothing happened when I put the CD-R in. I could hear a very soft, barely audible rhythmic humming sound, but the CD-R never showed up in the Finder.

I've tried to insert a couple of other CD-r's with the same result, so then I tried to insert a DVD and had similar results. I also have a store-bought optical drive CD/DVD lens cleaner that I inserted, and the drive immediately spits it back out.

I am clearly outside of my 1 year warranty and didn't purchase Apple-Care. :[
Is there any way of being able to tell for sure if my Super Drive is fried? Is it possible that it's a software/firmware issue?

It seems to be hardware related, but I did update to Lion very recently, so am not sure. Any suggestions are appreciated!
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MBP 15" Late 2011 2.2ghz i7, 8GB RAM, 128GB OCZ-VERTEX4 SSD, 500GB SATA HD
Sorry to see nobody else has bothered replying to your question...

You say you tried a dvd? Was this a movie dvd or a blank dvdr? If it was a blank dvdr try putting in a movie and see what to outcome is.
If it plays then there could be some kind of software issue and i would suggest you install lion again. If it doesn't play however, it looks like for some reason only god would know, your drive has cashed in it's pension early and gone for retirement
 

bobtomay

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Your Mac's Specs
15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
If you do not have the Finder Preferences set to show discs in the Sidebar and Desktop, it will not show.

Did you try opening a burning app after you inserted these blank discs to see if the disc was detected?

Did you open Disk Utility to see if it mounted the disc?

Open Finder - Preferences - General tab and put a check in the box to have discs show up on the Desktop - same for the Sidebar tab.
 

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