Cannot play dvd on macbook pro how to#
If you don’t know how to use either, it might be smart to have someone else help you with this step quite honestly, because if you mess up this file, it’s not going to be pretty to fix things. To do so, open up the file in question with either the text-based “vi” editor or the somewhat easier to use “pico” editor. What we are going to add is the ‘mbasd=1′ which most people believe stands for “macbook air superdrive’ (mba sd). Before you enable the external Superdrive, the line highlighted will simply look like:
What you need to add is the information I’ve highlighted above. Do it wrong and, well, you could be up a creek without the proverbial paddle. Lots of cryptic things that are very important for the system to boot up and work properly, so it’s not without some tiny trepidation that I recommend you tweak this file. If it’s wrong, use Delete to back up and fix things - is: cat /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/ Nothing happens until you hit Return, so take your time to double-check you’ve entered things correctly first. The first command you’ll want to type - and on the command line it’s critical that you type slowly, carefully and accurately. In fact, forget about your mouse and buttons: it’s a keyboard only world we’re heading into now. To get it to work, launch Terminal.app, which will pop up a window where you type in commands rather than click and drag. It’s a nice, sleek external drive and last I checked, you can pick one up on eBay for about $50 on eBay.
You’ll need your system administrator password and some level of comfort working on the command line in Terminal.app (which can be found in Applications -> Utilities).įirst off, here’s a pic of the MacBook Air Superdrive, so we can be sure we’re on the same page before we start: You’re on your own if you get this to work with one of those (but I imagine it’ll work just fine: if you do test it with good results perhaps you can post a comment letting us know?)
Cannot play dvd on macbook pro mac os x#
But it just ain’t so…įixing it turns out to be easy, but it involves a bit of a hack to the Mac OS X operating system itself, and while I’ve tested it out on Lion, I haven’t tried it on Leopard, Snow Leopard or OS X Mountain Lion. For everything else it just acts as if it’s not plugged in or that the USB plug itself is damaged and non-functional. Turns out that it should work just fine with any Mac system, but that there’s a little switch in the operating system itself that only lets the drive work on the MacBook Air and - as it turns out - certain models of the Mac Mini. This is an interesting situation because you’re right to be suspicious of how the Apple external USB Superdrive is completely dead when plugged into your MacBook Pro.