Use this clever way to clean a Mac's SuperDrive I rarely used the SuperDrive in my 2009 MacBook Pro. I can't remember the last time there was anything I needed to read or load from a CD. But in 2011, a friend's kid wanted to watch a DVD on my laptop during a trip. We inserted the disc, only to have the SuperDrive spit it right back out. Matter of fact, it ejected every subsequent DVD and CD we put in. I didn't really care that my SuperDrive seemed to be bust as I had no use for it, but over the next year, I would occasionally attempt to get it working by running various CD cleaner products on it and blowing inside the drive. Nothing worked, so I just assumed the drive was dead. Last month I gave the MacBook to a friend. I warned him the SuperDrive didn't work and if he wanted a working one, he'd need to pay to replace it. He asked me if I tried everything to clean the drive. I told him I had. But for some reason that night I decided to do a Google search on the best ways to clean your optical drive.

I came across this thread on Apple's support communities and had my friend follow it to the letter -- minus one step. To my utter shock, my friend called me up the next day saying the SuperDrive was as good as new. Here are the steps he followed. I've also marked the step he did not follow: Get hold of a credit card. Cut a strip of fine, lint-free cotton cloth as wide as the credit card and twice its length. Wrap the cloth around the credit card lengthwise and hold it taught between your thumb and forefinger at one end. [My friend did NOT do this step] Dab some lens cleaning fluid on the bottom side of the cloth-wrapped card. (Camera lens fluid will do.) Insert the cloth-wrapped credit card on the left-most side of the slot drive by about 1.5 inches. (Make sure the Mac is powered off.) Pull the credit card out and insert again -- repeat four to five times -- add some more cleaning fluid if it evaporates. My friend found that following this procedure (minus step 4) completely fixed the SuperDrive in the MacBook Pro that had not worked in almost four years.

As noted by the original poster, "Any readers that want to try the above on their own optical drives should do so at their own risk. We also highly recommend no one follows step 4 as putting any kind of liquid in a computer can have damaging, irreversible effects." Sold by GizmosForLife and Fulfilled by Amazon. Allsop Ultra ProLens Cleaner for DVD, CD Drives, and Game Players (23321) Item Package Quantity: 1 0.5 x 6 x 11 inches #26 in Electronics > Accessories & Supplies > Audio & Video Accessories > Cleaning & Repair > Lens Cleaners #1,092 in Electronics > Accessories & Supplies > Television Accessories #1,675 in Electronics > Televisions & Video See all 345 customer reviews T. H. Van Vleck See all 345 customer reviews (newest first) This emphatically does not work in slot drives. I used it in both my Apple Superdrive and the built-in DVD player on my television and both just spit it right back out moments... Good product...easy to use.

Worked very well for an older disc player. TRIED IT ON TWO DVD DECKS THAT WERE NOISY OR SPOTTY. FIRST OFF THE CLEANER DISK MADE STRANGE MECHANICAL NOISES IN BOTH DRIVES TRIED. I appreciated the thoroughness of the product. I have tried other products and this one was straightforward and caused me to use less effort.Works perfectly on players and computers IP address: 54.203.152.209Time: 2016-09-25T15:53:26ZURL: http://www.youtube.be/watch%3Fv%3DZXFfDRRXyCA%26feature%3Dfvwrelair purifier for potThe first sign of malfunction was that the MBP started to be picky about what sort of blank CDs/DVDs it would accept for writing. air purifier flu virusThis was not a big deal since it still accepted 9 out of 10 CDs without any problems.fresh air focus air purifier

Some time later I had a failed burning. The burn process started OK, but near the end (or maybe during writing the lead out?) it failed with some mysterious error message. This was quite strange, but I was still not very suspicious (this is my first Mac and having grown up using PCs with Windows I got used to failures). However lately I started to have problems even reading my CDs and DVDs. This was the last drop of water in the glass. Every sign pointed to either a broken optical drive or malfunction due to dusty lens. I already had issue with dust on the lens of various CD/DVD drives in the household (eg. the Hi-Fi system and my old PC had problems reading CDs too and a manual cleaning of the lens helped - I tried a lens cleaning kit too, but it was worth nothing). So I was up and ready for cleaning the lens of the MacBook Pro's SuperDrive, however I was a bit unsure about whether there's any gotcha in taking the SuperDrive apart. I had no difficulties with my old PC's 5.25" Plextor DVD-writer (you just had to remove the screws from the drive's case and take off the upper part and the lens was right there), but I've never taken apart a slot-loading drive.

Notebook optical drives are a lot smaller and I wanted to see some proof-of-concept photos to get reassurance. After having spent some time with Google, I've stumbled on a discussion thread on Apple's forums that contained a few pics of a slot-loading SuperDrive's internals. It didn't seem risky to take apart so I started the process. The first step is to take apart the MacBook Pro. iFixit has a very detailed guide on how to do this, so I'll skip over that. After you got the optical drive out from the MBP, you place it on your workpad like this: As you can see, I've kept the tape on the ribbon cable. I didn't see any reason to remove it. If you've followed the iFixit guide til the end, you've already removed the mounting brackets from the drive. You should memorize which bracket goes to which side and which screw goes into which hole. Otherwise the reassembly will be a little bit tricky for you. I've taken some pictures of the brackets, it seemed to be the fastest way to take a snapshot of the original mounting of the brackets.

After you've removed the brackets, you've to take off the four screws that keep the lower and the upper half of the unit's case together. Here's a pic with all the brackets and these 4 additional screws taken off: Now you can remove the upper part of the case. It's really easy to do, just do it slowly, no need to hurry. You'll get to see something like this: Here I've drawn a small red circle around the lens: For cleaning the lens I use benzine (the one used for medical disinfection ... we used to have a bottle of this at home): it's great dissolvent (eg. to remove glue that remained on a newly bought product after having removed the price sticker) and it evaporates practically without a trace. It's perfect for this kind of a job (however I've read that some people prefer to use some kind of alcohol). To apply the benzine to the lens surface I use q-tips (that should not be hard to get either ): After the cleaning the lens is as good as new: Reassembling the unit should be a piece of cake.

Put it back into the MBP, put the MBP together and test the optical drive's CD/DVD reading and writing capabilities to see if the cleaning had any positive effect. For me it was worth the trouble. I can now read every CD/DVD of mine again and writing works perfectly too. it happened today for the first time -since I wrote this article- that I could not read a CD with my MBP's superdrive. The time period was almost 20 months. And since I bought my MBP during Christmas in 2006 (27th of December to be precise), it was 20 months between the date of purchase and the first cleaning. So it's now quite certain that my drive needs cleaning every 20 months. I live close to a road with a pretty high traffic and not too rich vegetation, so a lot of dust is coming into the flat. Probably people living in the suburbs are better off regarding the required cleaning frequency of their optical drives. three days ago I took apart my mom's Mac Mini to replace the hard drive (she outgrew the original 120 GB one).

Once at it, I couldn't resist to open and clean the DVD-RW drive too. Here's a pic showing the lens in the Mac Mini's SuperDrive (it's a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-K06, firmware version Q614): While opening the case, a small, white, plastic component accidentally popped out. It was not too difficult to put it back in place, but to make life easier, here's a pic showing the part that you should be careful with: I wrote a post about how cleaning the fan exhaust port can help you fix performance problems (lagging, slowness) of your notebook/laptop/workstation/etc. Check it out since if you already consider going "inside" your notebook, you might as well clean it out properly. I guess it's now my turn to thank for all the comments. Today was the first time that I actually tried the suggested (and many times confirmed) method of using a credit card wrapped in some cloth to clean the lens. I have an old CD that Mac OS X reported as being blank. I didn't want to take apart the Macbook just to read this one CD, so I took a credit card, wrapped it in a wet cloth (a microfiber one used for cleaning glasses) and pushed it through the CD slot.