Notebook optical drives are a lot smaller and I wanted to see some proof-of-concept photos to get reassurance. 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. 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.

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). I already had issue with dust on the lens of various CD/DVD drives in the household (eg. Every sign pointed to either a broken optical drive or malfunction due to dusty lens. This was the last drop of water in the glass. However lately I started to have problems even reading my CDs and DVDs. 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).

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 not a big deal since it still accepted 9 out of 10 CDs without any problems. The first sign of malfunction was that the MBP started to be picky about what sort of blank CDs/DVDs it would accept for writing.

Mac airbook cd drive