Macbook Pro DVD drive not reading discs

Hi All,

I think my DVD drive's basically bust as it can't boot off the installation DVD and makes quite a horrible noise before ejecting it. Some cd's/dvd's get recognised but not all

System profiler is showing the drive as a GS23N which looks like it's an Hitachi so can anyone recommend a decent replacement or any further troubleshooting I can do before I go spend on another drive?

I've reset the PRAM & SMC and that's not made a difference.

Cheers,

James.

Welcome to the Mac Forums.

Do you want an exact replacement or a substitute drive? Or, would you rather use an external optical drive. (less expensive)

Either way, go to Other World Computing and look over what they have.

Hi there, thanks for the reply. I'm just looking for a replacement (i.e. reliable!) drive. An external DVD makes sense too but I might as well just take out the old one and replace it.

Any suggestions as to which is the best to replace it with?

Cheers

jslater said:

...
Any suggestions as to which is the best to replace it with?

Cheers

Click to expand...

go here

chscag said:

... go to Other World Computing and look over what they have.

Click to expand...

Laptop and iMacs seem to have a very high failure rate which may be due to the minaturization. Be aware than if you wish to install Windows using Bootcamp, will not install from an external optical drive. Otherwise external Pioneer is recommended.

Have you tried cleaning the drive yet?

long delay for a long story. cleaning the drive did actually work even though, when using the Leopard install disk the first couple of seconds sound like a garden strimmer before quietening down so I still think it's on its way out.

Problem 1) was that I've got a snow leopard backup on time machine that I wanted to restore from and, after a couple of attempts at trying this (kernel panic on reboot/restore), I found that Leopard can't restore from Snow Leopard images.

So, I waited for Lion to come out and burnt an install DVD from the download image. The re-install worked which was cool but on the application side MS Office kindly asked me to re-activate the license key.

All great except that this was an official downloaded copy of which they email you the activation key which was stored in (you guessed it) Outlook! Total catch 22.

Luckily I still had the old drive so rebooted off that, saved off the mail as a text file on an external h/d and plugged the new one back in. Office now was happy (thanks Microsoft for being so utterly moronic...).

Final issue was, after upgrading to Lion, MBP simply hung on reboot. Trying it in verbose mode showed it was stuck on the VMware drivers. An uninstall/install of 3.1.3 Fusion solved the problem and I finally had a working laptop again.

Another interesting point with Time Machine was that, as soon as I'd upgraded and rebooted cleanly, it went and deleted any old images automatically so I couldn't have gone back to a previous backup of Snow Leopard even if I wanted to - didn't think that was too smart tbh.

Who said that Apples "just work"

Cheers for the help.

Well Apple do not manufacture the optical drive, just install what is purchased via contract.

harryb2448 said:

Well Apple do not manufacture the optical drive, just install what is purchased via contract.

Click to expand...

The one on my desk was made by National Panasonic

Unfortunately slot-loading drives are really exposed to contamination (dirt)