Disappearing SuperDrive

My SuperDrive stopped accepting CDs/DVDs. The motor simply wouldn't activate and "grab" them. Following advice elsewhere in these threads, I zapped the PRAM. I thought it worked, because it accepted the first DVD I inserted after the restart.
Then...it disappeared. There's no icon onscreen indicating an onboard DVD. Pushing the Eject button does nothing. I can't "Trash" the disc because there's no icon to drag.
I looked for the optical drive in System Profiler > Hardware > ATA and the system reported "No information found." Under Disc Burning, it said "No burning device was found. If you are using an external device please make sure that it is connected and powered properly."
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Matthew

Well I'll be doggoned. The DVD optical drive on my iMac "woke up" and is functioning normally again, after a coma that lasted several days. I was able to retrieve the DVD that it "ate," and play DVDs and CDs normally. It reappeared in the System Profiler menu also.
Now, by "normal," I don't mean healthy. It has always had a tendency to vibrate and rumble much more loudly than any other optical drive I have used, and often expels CDs/DVDs at an a alarmingly high temperature. I had always attributed this to the hot-running G5 processor, but could it be the drive itself needs a tune-up? Is that much vibration and rumbling a sign that something really is wrong?

Similar Messages

Superdrive suddenly disappeared, Don't think its Firmware

Hi,
I was just typing on my MacBook Pro today, and the superdrive made a whirring noise while there wasn't a disc in it. Just making sure, i stuck a Jack Johnson CD in it (its played in there before) and the drive sucked it in like normal, spun it a coupla times then stopped. it didnt come up in finder, itunes, disk util. and under system profiler it says that "No burning device was found. If you are using an external device please make sure that it is connected and powered properly."
I don't think its the firmware, because I was watching movies on it just a week ago, and i havent updated anything except to Microsoft Office 08. Theres still power in the drive, upon start up, i can hear the drive spin a few times. Any ideas?
Thanks

Try doing a Parameter RAM reset - hold down apple/option/p/r keys at start up and wait for three chimes before releasing the keys.

Superdrive disappeared

Thats the best way i can describe it.
I put in a dvd into my mac and when i went to play it there was no dvd. i tried to eject and nothing happens. There is no icon on the desktop for the dvd either. i went to open "dvd player" and i got an error "A valid dvd drive could not be found [-70012]"

Hi
After doing a search of discussions, the only thread I could find mentioning error -70012 was this one:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4773551
Steve
You could try this (might be relevant):
http://forums.macnn.com/peripherals-57/211841/dvdplayer4-and-external-pioneer-dv d-r/print/
Message was edited by: SteveLamb0

Internal Hard Drives Disappeared, Finder Memory Problem

Hello Helpful Folks,
I recently installed an addional internal Hard Drive, and an additional 1GB SDRAM. This worked great for a day, but the next morning, after powering up, system was extremely sluggish, and after much deadline-induced impatient problem solving, has gone from bad to worse (system refuses to acknowledge existence of internal Hard Drives). I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but as
the devil is in the details, I figure too much info is better than not enough.
Following is a breakdown of my system: AS IT LAST WORKED; RECENT UPGRADES; and MY LAME ATTEMPTS AT PROBLEM SOLVING THAT HAVE MADE THINGS WORSE. Please don't interpret my all caps as shouting, just trying to organize this post for better clarity.
System is dedicated to Video Editing with FCP 3, running under OS 9.2.2. System is "off the Grid", i.e. no network, no internet, no printer, no gaming devices. System was purchased new in July 2001, by a friend. At one point I know this system had an Airport card, which was removed prior to my purchase in 2003. I can't remember what else it may have had installed in its history, but here's what it has now:
SYSTEM AS IT LAST WORKED:
**bold items are upgrades Original Owner or I installed with no apparent problems**
Power Mac G4 "Quicksilver" 2001
867 PowerPC G4, 256 L2, 2MB L3
-1 Stick "ValueRAM - KVR 133 x 64 C3/512" in PC 133 DIMM slot **
- "Virtual Memory" was turned off years ago due to conflict with FCP 3
-2 empty DIMM slots
-1 60 GB internal HD (Maxtor Ultra ATA/100), 1 partition, formatted HFS+, jumpered as "Master" on Internal ATA 2 ID=0 (which as I understand it is ATA/66 speed)
-1 Pioneer "Superdrive" DVD-R/W/CD-R/W on Internal ATA 0 ID=0
-NVIDIA GeForce2 MX with 32MB SDRAM in AGP Slot, feeding a 17" Apple Studio Display.
-PCI Display Card "formacGA7" - not attached to any external device, not sure what its intended purpose is.**
-3 Empty PCI Slots
-OEM Keyboard attached to Monitor's rear USB port.
-Microsoft 3 Button Wheel mouse with "IntelliEye" (wheel is 3rd Button) connected to Keyboard USB port (right side).**
-2 OEM FireWire (400) ports
-2 OEM USB (1) ports
Peripherals that have worked in various configurations with this system over the past 3 years:
-3 OWC Mercury Elite ("Oxford Chipset") Externally powered, External FireWire(400) 200GB Hard Drives, 1 partition each, formatted HFS+, daisy-chained to either of the FireWire ports.
-1 Canon GL1 MiniDV camera, attached either to the other FireWire port, or to the last drive in the chain, depending on my urgency/laziness factor. BTW, FCP 3 has worked flawlessly controlling this Cam for logging and Batch Capturing.
Applications on System Hard Drive that I have OEM CDs for:
-OS 9.2 - (I think I remember that OS X was removed from system due to conflicts shortly after original purchase)
-FCP 3
-DiskWarrior (version unknown, purchased from Alsoft in 2003)
-OWC Intech Hard Disk SpeedTools ver 3.5
Other CDs I have:
OEM CDs for Power Mac G4:
-Software Install, OS 9.2, CD vers 1
-Software Install, OS 10.0.4, CD vers 1
-Software Restore, OS 9.2 & 10.0.4 CDs vers 1, Discs 1-4 of 4.
-OEM Apple Hardware Test; Power Mac G4, SW vers 1.2.1
Applications on system Hard Drive that I don't have CDs for, that I rarely use, but I'd like to keep:
-After Effects 5.0
-QuickTime Player 6.0.2
-Toast Audio Extractor 1.1
-Toast Titanium 5.0.2
Applications on system Hard Drive I use if my wife is busy on our Windows XP machine:
-Photshop 6.0
-Microsoft Word & Excel
# of other Applications on System Hard Drive I either don't use or may be integral to the system: 260
# of Control Panels:
-Enabled: 34
-Disabled: 0
# of Extensions:
-Enabled: 174
-Disabled: 0
note: a number of the applications and extensions are for AOL, Quickbooks, Microsoft Money and the like, as well as other things I don't use (Airport, USB printers, Networking, etc.)
Smart things I did:
-Regularly made backup copies of my FCP projects to the external drives.
-Bought a copy of MacDrive so I can see what's on my External Drives on the XP machine.
-Printed out System Profile before I installed upgrades.
-Thoroughly searched this discussion board for and gathered as much info as I could before upgrading.
Dumb things I did:
-Made a copy, but not a clone, of my System Folder to one of the external drives when I first got it.
-Didn't keep any sort of separate log of what's on the External Drives.
-Never ran any sort of Disk Maintenance, even after one of the Externals crashed (DiskWarrior saved my butt on that).
-Ignored some of the advice on this discussion board.
Really dumb thing I did without even realizing it:
Captured all media for a rush job onto my internal system Hard Drive, as well as storing and using massive jpgs for the same job on that same drive...
Which led to painfully slow rendering times, and crashes caused by "Error: Out of Memory", which I interpreted as "Must buy more memory" and not "must make sure I'm not trying to edit media stored on system drive, especially with massive jpgs that I should reduce"
RECENT UPGRADES:
Here's what I did, and how I did it:
Turned off system, disconnected all External FireWire Devices, disconnected Monitor, opened case, touched various metal parts of case and power supply to discharge any Static, unplugged power cable.
-Installed 2 512MB sticks of "Lifetime" PC 133 SDRAM; total System RAM is now 1.5GB, all 3 DIMM slots now occupied.
-Installed 1 Maxtor "DiamondMax" Ultra ATA/133 100GB Hard Drive (8 MB buffer) as "Slave" (no jumper) in top of U-Carrier above System Hard Drive; attached to middle of original Apple ribbon cable, attached available power plug.
Taped spare jumper to inside of empty drive bay, noting origin and date. Did NOT push PMU button. Carefully closed case. Reconnected Monitor, did NOT reconnect any FireWire devices. Powered System on, but did NOT perform PRAM reset.
I don't remember the exact order of what happened next, but I think: System booted up normally, a window popped up saying a new drive had been found, would I like to intitialize it?, which I did as Mac OS extended, and then named. If I was instructed to restart, I did so, otherwise did not. Clicked on "about this Mac" and saw that it now showed 1.5GB RAM. I then went about moving Media/Render files off the System drive (and one of the Externals) onto the Internal Drive, with a combination of FCP's Media Manager, and dragging from the Finder. After files had copied, dragged Media/Render files from System Drive to Trash. Opened FCP project, had FCP re-link to new locations of missing files. Saved, closed, and re-opened project, set Capture/Scratch disc to new internal Drive. At some point I changed FCP's Memory Allocation from whatever it was to 512000KB Minimum, and 900000KB Prefered (and I hope I got all those zeroes right). Did NOT restart after changing Memory Allocation, unless a window popped up instructing me to do so, in which case I did. Re-opened my project, rendered a few thing at a noticeably increased speed, saved everything, emptied the Trash, shut everything down, and called it a night as it was 4:30 am.
A few hours later, I plugged the MiniDV and an External Drive into the FW ports and powered up the System. It was behaving extremely sluggishly. I would click on something, the pointer would turn into a wristwatch (sometimes with the minute-hand moving, sometimes not) and like an actual minute later, what I'd clicked on would open. All three drives were on the desktop, still had their files, and "About this Mac" still showed 1.5GB total Memory. So I powered down, disconnected the FW devices, waited a bit, and powered back up. Same sluggish response. I tried to open my FCP project file, and instead got a Window that said something to the effect of "The Application associated with this document could not be found". I think I tried to open FCP from the Applications folder on the System Drive and got the same message (I'd only had 3 hours sleep, no coffee, my client had died, and his family was coming for whatever I had in a few hours).
LAME ATTEMPTS AT PROBLEM SOLVING THAT HAVE MADE THINGS WORSE
Panic had set in, which never solves anything, so I don't remember what order I performed which tasks, between searching for clues in this forum, and convincing myself that that would be faster than trying to compose a question, waiting for a response, etc.
The first two things I did, and I can't remember which I did first (both from Keyboard Commands during Restart):
Rebuild Desktop
PRAM Reset
Neither of those solved the problem, so I continued.
I tried restarting without extensions.
I would get errors that said something like "Not Enough Memory to Open Finder".
I tried booting from Disc 1 of the Software Restore Disk, which only wanted to destroy my data.
I tried booting from the OS 10 disk, with the same result.
I was finally able to boot from the OS 9.2 Software Install Disk, and actually saw both internal drives on the desktop, and the 1.5GB RAM in About this Mac. I tried to allocate more memory to Finder, but was informed that "Cannot Perform Requested Operation. This operation requires versions above 8.0".
I think at this point I decided that I must have too many extensions, and started disabling ones I thought irrelevent to my cause (mostly anything that said "AOL", "Airport", "Ethernet", "Printer", "Modem", "Speakable", and a couple things called "Open TPT".
It gets worse. Then I decided to turn off some "unnecessary" things via the control panels, but somehow managed to disable the control panels themselves: AppleTalk, DialAssist, File Sharing, Modem, Mouse (as I saw that Microsoft Mouse was among the others), Remote Access, Speech, USB Printer Sharing, and possibly TCP/IP.
That certainly didn't help anything (though upon restarting from the OS 9.2 Disc I was able to see the extensions and control panels in their respective "Disabled" folders in the System Folder). But I still wasn't able to get more Memory to Finder.
So, I decided a few more PRAM resets might help, which succeeded in making both Internal Hard Drives disappear. I tried booting up from the DiskWarrior disc, but even the Mighty DiskWarrior couldn't find the drives. I performed the longer, in depth version of the Apple Hardware Tools tests, which reported that everything's fine (including the new RAM), but made no mention of the Hard Drives at all. The deadline having long passed, I shut the system down. I read through more posts and tech articles, etc.
I searched my External drives with MacDrive on my XP, and found the drive that has the copy of my System Folder (which shows all extensions and control panels as enabled); not sure if the Quicksilver will boot from that, I don't know what the Keyboard command for booting from a FireWire drive is (if there is one) and the drive itself only has 900MB of free space.
I can't find any reference to Internal ATA drives anywhere in the MacDrive documentation; if it was possible I'd put them into the XP, get the files off the Mac drives, reformat them and install OS9 from the Discs.
This is where I am now:
The Quick Silver is still powered down. I removed the Microsft mouse and replaced it with the OEM Apple mouse. I opened the case, and removed the PRAM/Backup battery (manufacture date: July 2001). Couldn't find my voltmeter, so took the bat to Radio Shack and bought a new one. Had the Radio Shack guy test the old one: it showed 3.69 volts still. Have not installed the new battery yet. The case is still open, waiting for any advice any of you might have to offer.
Thank you all so much for your patience in perusing and pursuing this.
Sincerely,
Patterson
Power Mac G4 Quicksilver 867 Mac OS 9.2.x 17" Studio Display, 512MB RAM

Thank you Rodney and John,
The jumpers are correct for both Maxtor Drives.
Rodney, you are correct in that the initial problem (slow rendering/"out of Memory" crashes) was caused by my not realizing I'd stupidly captured several GBs of media to my system drive, and not checking which drives those files were on (as I'd assumed I'd put them on one of my external media drives) once that problem presented itself.
Before I'd determined what I'd done, I bought the extra RAM. After I'd found the media files on the System Drive, and saw that my dedicated media drives were too full to easily move them, I decided to buy an additional Internal drive so that I could:
-Move the Media onto it relatively quickly and finish my urgent project.
-Juggle all my media into a more organized fashion for archiving (as most of my projects are on-going long-term affairs)
-Wipe it, Partition it, and clone my System Drive onto it, as a spare bootable drive in case my OEM System Drive failed.
Copying the Media files onto the New Drive and moving the System Drive's Media files into the Trash worked great: huge improvement in Rendering, etc.
Before shutting down for the night I Emptied the Trash, and was pleased with the amount of space I'd freed up on the System Drive.
My guess is that the System Drive was terribly fragmented, having been subjected to intense use over the past 5 years without any sort of Drive Maintainence, and deleting that massive amount from it in one shot caused my extreme system sluggishness upon Startup the next day.
My subsequent lame attempts to solve the sluggishnes ultimately resulted in my losing access to both drives.
Today, I replaced the Backup Battery, pushed the PMU, re-attached the AC, and Powered Up with the case open as per your suggestion.
It was trying for a few minutes (the gray screen went black at one point, and then returned to gray) before presenting me with the flashing question mark.
There was, however, a quiet but distinct "buzzing" sound that would alternate: 1 sec "buzz", one second silence, one second "buzz", one second silence, etc. coming from the drives, even after the "?" appeared.
I powered down, removed the Ribbon and Power Cables from the new "Slave" drive, and powered up again, with the exact same results.
I powered down, removed the Ribbon and Power cables from the original "Master" drive, reinstalled the Jumper on the New Drive as "Master", plugged the End of the Ribbon and the Power cables into the New "Master" drive and powered up. The screen went to the "?" within 20 seconds instead of 4+ minutes, and no more "buzzing".
I put the Apple Hardware Tools Disk in, ran the "long" test, and everything came out fine.
I have to abandon this for now, but thanks again for your previous advice, and any more you may have!
Cheers,
Patterson

IMac SuperDrive with Windows 8.1

After installing BootCamp drivers on my iMac 2011 27 inch (Mavericks, Windows 8.1) the internal SuperDrive disappears.
Before installing them I could use the SuperDrive. With Mavericks I haven't any problems with the Drive.
I think there went something wrong with the Apple Drivers.
Can anyone help me?

I am having the same problem. Everything worked great with the 8.1 install, then the superdrive disappeared in Windows only. I tryed the registry command you pasted to the forum, but it too does not work. I open the dos prompt in administrator mode, it says its an invalid command. My machine is a mid 2011 21.5 IMAC 2.7 GHZ 12 GB ram OSX mavericks.
Any help you could provide would be appreciated.

DVD-R - folder disappear!

Here I am with a mystery.....
A friend of mine (win user) gave me a dvd-r containing photos splitted in 3 different folders.
In my win7 laptop I see everything without problem but... surprise, on my MBP (Lion) one of the folder simply disappear!
I tried also with my powermac (SL) and the result is the same even if I use a Lacie external device.
The DVD seems to be ok without any problem.
I changed also different views in Finder, just to be sure that it wasn't a stupid folder in a corner of the screen..
Do someone can help me to solve this mystery?
Thanks a lot
Alberto

Update
Another strange issue.
Very often I'm not able to read dvd made by win users.. I though about some compatibility problem but today I received a DVD prepared with iMovie. I can read it with all my pc or tv but not with my MBP.
Funny is that if I take an external dvd writer and copy the DVD using my superdrive as writer.. it works. Or better, the copy I made with superdrive works, the original not... I'm getting crazy!

Superdrive dvd will not play

I insert a dvd into my USB superdrive (attached to my iMac) and I can hear some mechanical things taking place then the dvd is ejected.
the last thing I was doing was running a dvd writing program on a Windows VM with some Clone DVD software writing to disk. I left the machine to run on its own and when I returned the next morning I saw that the write had failed. My iMac was running very slowly. Initially my super drive would not accept any disks but after reboot the problem "disappeared".
Now none of my DVDs will play.

Disconnect the drive, reset the SMC and PRAM reconnect and see if it helps.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

Audio CD disappears after confirming impoty into iTunes

Setup:
Hardware: New Macbook Pro 15"
Software: Preinstalled software no modifications or additions solely upgrades.
When I try to import a CD into iTunes the following occurs:
1 The CD is displayed on the Desktop as Audio CD.
2 iTunes queries Gracenote and downloads the track details which flash up in iTunes.
3 The Audio CD icon disappears from the desktop and cannot be seen as mounted in either Finder or iTunes.
4 I press the eject button, eject the CD, push the CD back into the computer and the second time the Audio CD icon remains and the tracks can be imported. This is extremely easy to reproduce as it happens every time.
I am new to Apple and Mac OS X but this appears to be a possible bug. I am a systems developer on Linux, Unix, Windows .... but I am not familiar with the OS X API's or kernel. It appears that the automounting of the CD is not working.
I looked at the system.log in /var/log and kept seeing the following call fail.
/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes(1959) StatusMonitor::volumesChangedCallBack returned -47
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Macbook Pro Mac OS X (10.5.8) iTunes 8.1

Hi Deb,
Just to clarify the "Superdrive" thing:
All optical drives that can burn to DVD, installed as original equipment in Macs, are called "Superdrives".
The name covers a multitude of different drives installed over the years. Many of them, in fact, aren't all that "super". They often have downtuned firmware installed by Apple that actually reduces their capabilities by limiting burn speeds or compatible media types etc. Most have actually been either Matshita (ie Panasonic) or Optiarc (Sony NEC) or , less frequently, Pioneer drives in recent times.
Your Matshita UJ-845 is a "superdrive", as is the Matshita UJ-857E in the MBP I'm typing this on , too.
Apple installed drives which can read DVD's , but only burn to CD-R, are called "combo" drives. Again they can be from various manufacturers and have come as a vast array of models, speeds, etc over the years.
Cheers
Rod

Bluetooth disappeared from Hardware on Mavericks

Hi,
well I never used the Bluetooth since now I get a bluetooth speaker, so I relased the Bluetooth preferences disappeared from the Panel "System preferences" and also from the "System information" ***???
I don't know exactly when the bluetooth was gone, since I never used it and I always have it OFF form the System Preferences.
Some changes happened to my macbook since time ago, so if anyone can help me please with some ideas, I appeciate it, here are the tips for this puzzle:
- Macbook pro 15' mid 2010, 2.53 GHz Intel i5, came with Snow Leopard.
- I replaced the RAM, so I have 2 x 4 GB, total 8 GB.
- Had a problem with the video card (after updating to Mountain Lion) many kernel panics, the issue was this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3114550
- Apple relace my motherboard appling the replacement plan: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4088?
- HD resulted damaged (after all the kernel panics).
- I added a SD (120 GB) insted of the HD, and install a clean OSX Mavericks.
- Replace the Superdrive DVD with a HD (500 GB).
I just tried to reset the PRAM and SMC, erase the SystemPreferences folder form Preferences, Library and also reinstalled Mavericks from the Restore partition, non of this worked for me.
thank's a lot!
bye

I'm auto replying myself, because after some tests I did, I was eble to found the problem, and may be I can help somebody with a strang problem like mine
Well, all was my fault, when I replaced the Superdrive DVD with the SD I took off the cable that connects the wifi and bluetooth so I took it off again and I could see one of the little pins was strange, like folded itself, so I put that pin straight and now is working fine. I was not that careful I thougth when I replaced the DVD myself, so even if you are sure you can do it well, you have to be super super careful once you open your mac or send it to a service if you don't want any "surprise"
cheers!

File on DVD disappear

At one point I had a DVD burner on my machine. However, after I would burn the DVD and go back to test the files (paranoid), filenames and files would randomly start to disappear. I've since purchased another DVD burner think the last was faulty and found that it was not the case.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Sample: http://www.typegirl.com/temp/disappearing.png

I have had the same problem with different discs on different Superdrives (in Powerbooks, Macbook, eMac), but which work fine in PCs or my Xbox. On the Mac, files can just disappear from the DVD if I click on them or copy them. Sometimes I can get at them if I eject and reinsert, but not always. It's very annoying!
The discs are high quality DVD-R burned and verified in Toast 6 UDF format at 4x.
Help

MBP unibody - Bended body by superdrive

Hi all,
The body of my MBP (2008) unibody is bending slightly exactly where the superdrive is, closing the media slit in the body. This means that the slit where you insert the dvd/cd is no longer aligned to the actual superdrive slot. I have issues inserting and ejecting media as they touch the body.
Anybody else with similar issues, here the unibody is bending right where the superdrive is?
Thanks.

its true friends....
i observed it yesterday only. after playing battlefield 2 on MBP, strange noise appeared which was more like crackling of thin plastic material. it was coming from the rear and only after touching the black strip at the lower end of the screen. these noises disappear in the morning and are common with macbook's heating. this suggests that there is expansion of the metal case with heat which produces false movements of non-metalic parts. Only one thing we can do is to play graphic hungry games at less resolution or to use external cooling pads. i will post my experience with cooling pads soon.
regards
manish

I can not play .mpg (video file) on the SuperDrive

Bought for my iMac SuperDrive. On the DVD-R disc recorded video file .mpg. Insert into the SuperDrive and it does not see the file. More precisely see each file in 1 second and disappears immediately. What's the problem? On Windows, everything works fine.

Install Perian, VLC and Flip4Mac (payware)
http://perian.org/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html
http://www.telestream.net/flip4mac-wmv/overview.htm
oh, don't forget Flash too
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

DVD SuperDrive stops working

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro with the built in "superdrive", it is the OPTIARC DVD RW AD-7170A, Rev. 1.NC
I've noticed that it seems to stop working after having a disk in for 5 min or so. The discs will mount, but then disappear after a while and the drive starts this intermittent "clicking" noise as if its trying to read the disk. At this point the eject button does not open the drive, opening Disk Utility just hangs, and I can sometimes get it to eject by opening Parallels and ejecting from there.
Any ideas on this, or know if theres a firmware update? Or can anyone suggest an inexpensive replacement?
Thanks.

No solution here either guys....
This is really unfortunate. From what I can gather, the superdrives on these computers have had these problems for years. They stop reading or writing and theres little to no real solution. I LOVE APPLE.
But this is an annoyance that I haven't seen Apple address. Truthfully, by now, I would think they would have a driver fix or some kinda upgrade that can be applied to reset the drives.
My superdrive will not burn DL disks anymore. It won't mount some homemade regular dvds.
Patchburn could fix Tiger superdrives, or so I read, but apparently it "is unnecessary" and won't work with Leopard.
I tried the changing of the language settings and restart fix but that didn't help.
Can someone come up with a fix for this stuff now?

USB card disappeared

I've been using a Belkin 2-port USB card in my Beige G3 for a number of years. This morning the card could not be found. I have an Epson 740 plugged into one of the ports and all lights on the printer just blinked all day. I could not print. The system profiler did not show the USB card.
On another note, I installed a superdrive about a month ago. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This morning while perusing the system profiler I clicked on ATA and the profiler froze -- never showed the superdrive. Had to force quit the system profiler, but it wouldn't quit, so I turned off the power to the computer.
Anyone have any idea why overnight the USB card just disappeared? And why the superdrive isn't recognized and only works on occasion?
Specs: G3 with Logitek 1.1 gig processor, 356MB RAM, 160GB HDD, OS 10.3.9.
Thanks!
Jon

Belkin USB 1.1 cards have caused a lot of grief in the Beige G3. Look at the largest chip on the USB card; if it says "OPTI," you may be better served by another card. The NEC chipset usually gives better reliability.
Before dumping the Belkin card, try moving it to the middle PCI slot. That sometimes makes the Belkin get happy again.

A1138 superdrive not recognized

My superdrive one day did not display a disc, and then would not eject the disc, and then disappeared from the ATA connection..

The least expensive and most useful diagnostic step is to buy a drive cleaning disk. They are usually US$5-15 at computer shops and home electronics stores. A dirty drive is not uncommon in notebooks with slot-loading drives. Dust and lint can occlude the lenses and make the drive appear dead.
If that does not help, you will need a new drive.

Disappearing SuperDrive

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