7578 Last Friday, I stuck a CD into my 17-inch PowerBook's SuperDrive to reinstall a software program on my backup boot partition. The drive grunted once; then spit out the disk. I tried reinserting the disk and again; same result.

OK, this was a backup disk that I had burned on another drive, so perhaps it wasn't to this drive's liking. I dug out the original install disk for the software, but the drive spit it out as well. I optimistically tried several other CDs and DVDs, and none of them would mount.

I don't use the PowerBook's optical drive a whole lot. The thin drive module used in these one inch thick PowerBooks and MacBook Pros is, how shall we say? - not particularly noted for ruggedness and reliability, so I try to baby it as much as possible and make it a point to use the FastMac SuperDrive expansion bay module in my old Pismo PowerBook for most disk-burning chores. The Matsushita guts of the FastMac unit seem to be quite robust, and it's also an 8x drive as opposed to the 4X SuperDrive in the PowerBook.

Anyway, I hadn't used the PowerBook's drive for a week or so, since running the OS 10.4.6 combo updater. Could that have bollixed the SuperDrive somehow? I booted back into OS 10.4.4 on the other partition. Same result. The SuperDrive still spit disks without mounting them. I began to wonder whether the drive had failed.

At this point I was pretty much at a loss has to how to proceed next, but decided that trying a power manager reset, which on the 17-inch PowerBook is a simple matter of shutting down the machine and pressing the Control, Option, Command, and Power keys simultaneously for few seconds; waiting another five seconds, then rebooting the computer. When I pressed the four keys, the SuperDrive made a whining noise, then the start-up chime sounded, and... when the bootup was completed, I tried that burned backup installer disk in the drive and it mounted and ran just fine.

You can always learn something new, I guess. This is an issue I had never encountered before with any of my Macs, and I still haven't a clue as to the cause, but if your laptop's optical drive starts spitting disks without mounting them, try resetting the Power Manager Unit. You can find instructions for all G3 and later PowerBooks and iBooks here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=14449

and for MacBook Pros, and MacBooks here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303319


Charles W. Moore

Tags: Blogs ï Hands On Mac ï

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