Ok, so I haven’t actually gone anywhere near this blog type thing in more than a year but admittedly I don’t quite see who would be particularly interested in reading about my day-to-day activities. I have however recently managed to get my MBP Superdrive to work again so I thought I’d share the details.

To start, I have a 15” MacBook Pro, A1260 model, which is a 2008 model. To make a long story short, the DVD drive has been quite temperamental after about 8-9 months of usage. For most DVDs and many CDs, it would just spin and spin and then eventually just spit the disk out. Once in a while a miracle would happen and it would actually mount the disk, only to spin a bit more in some very slow attempts at reading it. That is quite annoying for the most part and can get very problematic when trying to install a new hard drive/update the operating system/bootcamp the damn thing!

As I was still covered under AppleCare the solution seemed simple - get to a ‘Genius’ and get them to fix it. But is seems replacing a Superdrive is a long and laborious process as the earliest I was told I would be likely to get my mac back would be 5 days to a week later. Well, 33 screws, a few bits of yellow tape and lots of dust later, the Superdrive was out of the case and disassembled, cleaned with some lens fluid and a cotton bud and eventually happily working again!

Basically, as the slot is only protected by some fluffy bits, dust will inevitably get in the drive. So given enough dust, it will eventually stop reading things. A cleaning CD can probably alleviate the problem but given the amount of fluff and dust that I found inside my Superdrive, removing all that from the drive rather than just brushing it off the lens might be the more reliable solution.

Use the instructions on ifixit.com or instructables.com to get the Superdrive out and then follow the steps outlined here to disassemble the drive and clean it properly. It’s all easily doable with a set of little screwdrivers even if you don’t have the right torx.