Air/Retina Mac's Won't Mount External Optical Drives

Please Help. I recently upgraded hardware from a 2009 MBP and a 2007 MBP. My current problem is that on the i7 Air and i7 MBP w/ Retina it will no longer recognize USB Optical Drives on 10.8.2. It was crashing my i7 Air (panic attack-grey screens), so I returned and went with the Pro after store consult. I take the same hardware and plug it into my old machines and it works fine, running the same 10.8.2.
I have read many forum posts around the net and shown various solutions (flashing RAM, etc.). All of which have not worked on my setup, and the drive will still not mount. I have tried 2 seperate optical drives, 1 Blu-Ray and 1 DVD (Apple Superdrive - now returned).
Is there some tie to this issue and the fact that both the Air and MBP w/ Retina do not natively have optical drives? If so, is there some solution that can be performed to properly address this issue. This is a reasonable use case and I do not want the models with optical drives. Kinda surprised considering that Apple is pushing us to this no optical drive world that they would not support external ones inclduding their superdrive, which doesn't work in this case.

Duplicate post. Answered here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1614533

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[USB and FireWire Quick Assist|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1151]
[Common fixes for USB device issues (unrecognized, etc.)|http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070824012114701]
[What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire or USB device|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1317]

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Air/Retina Mac's Won't Mount External Optical Drives

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