Chosen Solution
I have an older Macbook Pro and I’m having trouble with my optical drive. I can insert discs, but it won’t recognize them (they don’t show up in the finder or in Disk Utility) and once in there, I can’t get them out (I’ve tried EVERY method…). I replaced the entire drive, but it’s still not working. Any ideas?
Have you replaced the optical drive cable? There are many small wires in an optical drive cable, some that control the power, and some that control data. Sometimes the data wires get crimped but the power wires are functional, causing a drive to seem to work and take in a CD, but then not read it correctly or respond to eject commands, etc. If you can let us know the last 3 of your serial number, we can look up the proper cable. If the problem is not the cable or the drive itself (assuming you’ve replaced the drive with a known-good drive, and cable), I would reset the PMU and PRAM, and then also try booting to a different volume in order to rule out software as the culprit.
can you hear if the drive is spinning them up once you put them in? i am assuming that you are manually opening the drive (i.e. small hole pin method). if not then i would think its the ribbon cable because you say you already replaced the drive.
