Macbook CD/DVD fail to load

MY sister has a macbook that is now 2 generations old. it is running OSX Tiger and recently, it has been unable to load CD/DVD's.

when a disk is inserted, it spins for about 30 seconds and just pops out.

i've tried to repair disk permissions to see if there was something funky there, but nothing worked.

i have a copy of techtools pro that i got with my Macbook pro, but i can't install it on her computer due to lack of an optical drive...

has this happened to anybody else?

any help would be greatly appreciated
Eric

p.s: now i know what macbook air users have to go through with lack of optical drive 0

*disregard*

Have you tried shooting some compressed air into the drive? might be some dust built up.

no i haven't, but that does sound fun

i shall give it a try
thanks for the fast answer.

any one else?

I have had this happen before a couple o' times. There are two scenarios, both have happened to me:

1) The drive is fugged. You will need a new one unless doing a CD/DVD air flush works to clean out dust.

2) If the drive accepts a commercial DVD/CD like a retail purchased music cd or a purchased/rented movie DVD and it works, it means your drive is good, but it will only read commercial discs and ones it burned originally. Drives usually start out able to read anything, but after time they sort of lose calibration and can only read commercial discs and discs that they burned only. I had this happen to one of my drives back in the day and Apple does not cover it under warranty as long as it can read commercial discs.

This is the scope of my knowledge on the matter

oky doky, after further testing, we have found out that it will load and mount dvds. *these are only commercial DVD's though, we haven't tried burned ones.

we tried the compressed air idea and it didn't seem to work.

the computer still has a 2 year warrantee, so having a part replaced isn't a problem, just last time something happened *fried my motherboard* it took about 2 1/2 months to get it back... bestbuys great customer service eh?.

i was thinking that there is a calibration error or an encoding problem...

thanks again for the help

anyone else have any ideas?
Eric

me too..

Hi,
I've got exactly the same problem - started last week, won't recognise audio cds just spins and spits them out, but dvds and cd-roms are fine. I've got a mbp running leopard, and my warranty has just run out.
Anyone else? Seems kinda strange that DVDs are fine - could it be a driver problem?

I've got sort of the same problem as well. The disc drives doesn't accept CDS very often, and won't ever seem to accept DVDs.

Two things.

1. I don't have something that fires compressed air, could I blow in it, or do something like that?

2. How much would it cost to repair it. I't not under warranty any more

To get Techtools pro on the other machine connect with a firewire cable and start it in target mode.

^i created a disk image of my techtools which came with my MBP and used a jump drive to get it over to the other computer. Techtools is saying that there isn't a problem...

so my guess is that it is a physical problem, i'm going to take it into best buy this weekend.

tell you what they say when i find out!
thanks for all the help
Eric