Disc drive spins and stops

Hi!
I have a data DVD containing several QuickTime files that i want to copy to my desktop. So I pop the disk in, and I can hear the drive spinning. The disc appears oin my desktop and I double clip to drag the files to my desktop. It continues to spin, and after a while I can hear that the spinning dies and I can see in the file transfer window the amount of time that will require to complete the task. it just hangs there not transferring any more. Only a third of what i want to drag over is copied over. I have the same problem with other discs as well. Is this a MBP problem? What can I do to resolve it?

Sounds more like an optical drive issue. If you are having this with multiple discs and the discs are not scratched I would first try to re-install OS X. May just be something quarky with the OS. If that does not resolve the issue I would point the the optical drive being no good and take it in for service.
Good Luck.

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I just brought my MacPro in for service and they replaced my hard drive. However, now my disc drive has suddenly stopped working! Is there anything I can do to fix this without having to take it back in for service, again!?

The nearest service center is 2 hours from my house and my computer isn't under warranty anymore, so I need alternative options. I'm just frustrated that my disc drive was totally fine until AFTER I took it in for service. I just paid a lot of money for a new hard drive from the apple store and now my disc drive has suddenly stopped working correctly. I tried with multiple CD's and DVD's...loading a disc, but my computer would just make a weird loading noise and then eject the discs. Now it has started fighting taking the disc, so I have stopped trying. Is there anyway to fix this problem without taking it in for service again and paying another boat load of money?
Thanks in advance for your help!

ShelbyMackenzieLynne,
when you say that your disc drive is damaged, do you mean your MacBook Pro’s hard disk drive, or do you mean its SuperDrive (the CD/DVD drive)?
When you’d updated your MacBook Pro to Mavericks, did the installation succeed, and subsequently freeze up? Or did it freeze up during the Mavericks installation?
Which version of OS X was installed on your MacBook Pro before you’d installed Mavericks?
Are you currently able to boot into the Mavericks recovery partition? To see if you can do so, hold down a Command key and the R key while starting up your MacBook Pro.

Hard drive starts and stops a few times

I went to my parents for the Christmas holidays today and tried to use their older computer to put music on to my iPod. Since it's so old I couldn't use iTunes, so instead I used Ephpod. After it was done copying the files to the iPod I saved the changes and disconnected, but immediately afterwards instead of going straight to the menu, the hard drive started and stopped about 10-15 times with the Apple logo being displayed. Now I can't reach the menu, the hard drive will start and stop spinning until it gives up, and when I reconnect it to the computer it won't even recognize it as an external drive. Any ideas?
eMac Mac OS X (10.4.3)

I have the same issue and the iPod wont reset.

HT201364 I bought my iMac in the fall of 2008; I am running 10.6.8. Can't get Maverick to download--just spins and stops. Any ideas? Do I need a special app when I go to the App Store?

I bought my iMac in the fall of 2008; I am running 10.6.8. Can't get Maverick to download--just spins and stops. Any ideas? Do I need a special app when I go to the App Store?

Nothing special. You must havethe app store app installed in 10.6.8. Find Mavericks in the app store. Downloadit. It will take a while (5.31GB) and install thi installer ion your applications folder. Then you can proceed at your leisure.
Check hard disk space, permissions, apple-ID, retry.
Grant

Empty DVD drive spins and hums while battery is charging

This is odd and specific: When the battery runs down on my Powerbook and goes to sleep, I plug in the charger and the DVD drive starts spinning. It gives a continuous hum, despite being empty, which stops when I sleep the computer. When I reawaken it, it hums again. It takes three or four times of waking and sleeping before the DVD drive finally stops spinning. Pressing the Eject button does nothing and the drive has no media in it. It only does it while the battery is charging; once it's charged, unplugging and replugging does nothing. Any idea what's up? How to get it to stop? Thanks!

Arvin: Are you quite certain there's no disc in the drive? Nearly all of the vibration that you feel and the sound that you hear when an optical drive is operating normally is caused by the disc itself being minutely (or sometimes not so minutely) unbalanced. There should be far less noise and vibration without any disc in the drive, because only the drive motor is spinning. Of course without a disc in the drive, the motor shouldn't be spinning at all — as you know.
Start your Powerbook up from a cold shutdown while holding the mouse button down. Keep holding it; if there's a disc in the drive, it should be ejected before the computer starts up. If that yields no results, try (very gently) inserting a disc into the drive. If it inserts normally, you were right: the drive is empty. It shouldn't be spinning, and I don't know why it is.
If the disc runs into something and won't go in, don't push it: there's already a disc in the drive, and now the problem becomes how to get it out. I'm betting there is indeed a disc in there that you've forgotten about, and that isn't being ejected. Failure to eject a disc using any of the standard methods suggests a mechanical failure of the drive, which will need to be replaced if it can't be persuaded to behave.
The disc, if there's one in there, can be manually recovered in the course of replacing the drive — a fairly simple do-it-yourself job for anyone who isn't all thumbs and can follow directions.

Disc drive fails and iTunes won't recognize CD after burning

Hi all,
I'm having a strange issue with iTunes on my work computer, a Dell Optiplex GX280 with Windows XP installed, iTunes version 8.2.1.6.
About half of the time when I burn an audio CD, iTunes (or perhaps my computer) seems to have a problem with the final burn step. It goes through the whole process just fine, but after the countdown hits 0:00, I don't hear the 'your CD is finished' chime from iTunes, nor does the disc appear on the lefthand menu. The CD drive also doesn't respond at this point - the drive won't eject via iTunes or by me pressing the button (it will hard-eject with a paperclip-in-the-hole trick, but still doesn't respond after that). The only way I can get the disc to eject is by restarting the computer, at which point it will eject. After a restart, the AutoPlay will identify the burned CD as a blank disc, but if I try to re-burn it in iTunes, it gives me the error message "This is not a blank CD." (and of course the burn wasn't successful - it won't play in a stereo or in the computer). I'm wasting a lot of CD-Rs this way! :-/
I'm stumped. It seems to me that something in that final step of the burn process is causing the CD drive to fail, but I'm not sure what I can do fix the problem. Could it be the brand of disc I'm using, or something with the actual disc drive? Any help would be very much appreciated!

Okay, apologies for the duplicate thread - I tried searching and didn't see anyone with a similar issue, but now I see a thread down the page with the same issue of the disc not ejecting. I'll try WMP and see if that works any better...

CD/DVD in Satellite L300 1AM in WinXP- drive runs and stops alternately

Hello
I have bought a new Satellite L300 1AM
I have installed WinXP Home SP3 system (using nLite and SATA driver from Storage Manager), and all drivers from Toshiba website.
I have problem with CD/DVD drive (HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50N):
-copying from CD/DVD on HDD looks like following: for some time (few second upto few minutes) data is copying; then drive slows down and stops, copying is stopped, progress bar does not move; after e.g. 1 minute drive starts to rotate and next part of data is copying. Sometimes system stops to respond and one has to reset computer, sometimes computer restarts automatically...
-listening to audioCD music and watching DVD movies look similar, it easy to imagine...
-uninstaling DVDRAM in Device Manager and restarting system helps a bit, i.e. time of copying becomes a bit longer..., sometimes problem occurs with next CD/DVD in drive
-AudioSilencer do not change anything
-writing on CD/DVD is also impossible - progress bar stops after 1-2 minutes and nothing happens. Yellow diod is still on and to stop process one has to restart system...
What is interesting, drive works perfectly with newest Debian LiveCD version...
Has anybody any ideas???
Thanks in advance
Jan

Hi
SATA driver has been integrated with WinXP CD using nlite - this allowed installer to find HDD and to install system :) Driver has been taken from the Storage Manager package. Later, with system installed, I run .exe from that package again.
Do you think SATA driver should be installed somehow once again?
In IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers I have only one position:
"Intel(R) ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller"
Should I have IDE Channels despite both DVDROM and HDD are SATA?
Lars_3, I agree, it MUST be software problem!
Perhaps something like interference or conflict between programs or drivers...
Drastic solution is to reinstall system completely and to check the correctness of CD/DVD-reading after each newly-installed program or driver... but I would like to avoid this way as long as possible :)
The problems occur with disks of various manufacturers, which work correctly on several other computers
PS CD/DVDs are read correctly also under Debian 5.0.0 installed parallelly on HDD
Jan

Dead internal eSATA hard drive - spins and clicks, but won't mount

I'm trying to help a friend whose internal drive died. She has since replaced it in her Powerbook, but would like to salvage the data on the old one.
I got it connected to my laptop via USB, with one of those Newer Tech multi-connectors, but all I get is a cycle of spinning and clicks, which repeats itself without the head actually reading, or mounting the drive's image on the desktop.
I'm not interested in using the drive in the future. I just want to be able to copy the data within it, so I can give it to my friend. Any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated.
TIA,
BK
Message was edited by: Blague

No Powerbook can use a SATA or eSATA drive internally. The drive is an ATA/IDE (aka PATA) drive. The reason it doesn't read or mount when connected to your laptop, which I hope is a Mac, is that it has failed. If you're connecting it to a Windoze PC laptop, don't: you'll get nowhere that way. Connect it to your G5 instead.
Once you have the bad drive connected to a Mac, download and run the free demo version of any or all of these data recovery utilities:
Data Rescue
FileSalvage
VirtualLab
All three come in demo versions that will show you what the full version could recover before you have to pay for anything.

External drive starts and stops

I have two IMacs, a 21 and 27 inch, both with OS X 10.6.8 (not 10.6.5 as I see below). I always have an external LaCie drive attached to the 27". When I leave that computer in "sleep" mode the external drive periodically revs up for five or ten seconds then stops. When I have an external drive attached to my 21 inch this never happens. I have no idea what's going on. Is there some setting on the 27 inch that I could change? Is the LaCie drive somehow determining this? Would love to stop it. I'm always a bit amazed at how these drives last, spinning away at 7200 rpm, so I'd rather they only be spinning when they are actually being used.
Thanks.
John

I would go into your  in the upper left corner of the mac
Click on system preferences
Click on energy saver
Change the computer sleep and display sleep to never.

Apple and spinning and stops. Safe mode works ok.

I was trying to install DavMail to exccess exchange 2003. after several reboots in the process it now stops at the apple and spinning wheel screen. I can boot into safe mode. There I moved the DavMail and Office 2011 apps to the trash can, but still hangs at the same spot. Can anyone help? Thank you

As in andy's report, I also do not have an
"UpdateSettings" item in
/System/Library/StartupItems.
UpdateSettings seems suspect.
Dr Smoke & Andy:
Thank you for pinpointing the UpdateSettings startup as being aberrant in my StartupItems folder. I'm at work now, and can't try deleting it, (on my home machine,) but will do so once I get home. I think I know the reason why it's there, however. I suspect that you're correct, and that it is supposed to be deleted after a fresh install, (of which I've done so many these last few days.) However, I bet that when you boot in Safe Mode it never has the opportunity to be executed! As you know, I don't have an alternative to booting in Safe Mode, as the machine freezes before I can even login on a standard boot. I can delete the item manually, I guess. Or perhaps I can run it manually so that it gets the chance to do the cleaning up after the install which is probably it's job. (Don't know how to do that, but suspect it will involve invoking it from the terminal, once I check what is inside that folder when I return home.
Thanks again, guys, for your efforts,
Chris

I have a pavillion dv6604nr and it will not boot. the disc drive lites and then nothing.

i was using the computer and all of a sudden my screen looked like a candy cane horizontally. i took out the hard drive and still could not get a bios screen, so i am looking for suggestions or the type of hard case i can buy to use my hard drive. i bought a 2.5 from best buy and it didnt match.
This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi:
You need to get a USB to SATA 2.5" HDD enclosure.
Did you remember to remove the hard drive connector from the disk?
The thing that looks like this? That is removable. You just have to yank on it.

Maximum disc drive size and speed?

I want to install new enterprise quality boot drives in two MacPro towers before I upgrade to Lion because my Snow Leopard installs have been buggy and unstable. The current drives offer 2 & 3 TB capacity, 6.0Gb/s interfaces and 64 MB Cache. I don't know the difference between SATA I and SATA II. Nor do I know how much the original MacPro (2006) and the 2nd generation (early 2008) can handle. Will the new drives simply perform at the maximum capability of the internal bus?

Yes, Enterprise drives both typically carry a longer warranty and are actually individually tested. Consumer drives are left to the buyers to do the quality control testing, in my opinion a travesty. But one we can handle by carefully testing all drives before putting them into production.
Mechanically a Enterprise drive is the same as a desktop drive. So MTBF is a factor of quality control and just plain warranty dollars instead of actual life span. They charge more for drives that have a higher warranty and MTBF rating - mostly it comes down to difference in marketing.
Big difference with an Enterprise drive is it has firmware features and functions designed for a multiuser server environment. That means the drive is optimized to enhance multi user access, a stacked command kind of load that no desktop computer has to typically duplicate.
You won't have many issues running standard issue Enterprise drives inside a MacPro. The Intel chipset pretty much ignores all those fancy server features and seems to be capable of handling most of them without problems. Lots of problems attaching Enterprise drives to eternal hosts though, from Firewire to USB to eSATA and even hardware RAID controllers, those features get in the way as often as not.
As long as the Enterprise drives do not have specific firmware for some arcane OEM you should be fine. Personally, I just stick with simpler cheaper desktop drives. I can move them around to external storage as well without having compatibility issues.
Rick

Disc drive noisy and screen frozen

My Mac Mini made a very loud noise while a CD was playing and my screen froze up. I was forced to force quit by pressing the on/off button on the back of the computer. Now it will not complete a reboot. How do I reboot and get the CD out of the computer?

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2097
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5064261?tstart=0
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4278382?tstart=0

Disc Drive constantly spinning

My Disc Drive spins 80% of the time that the laptop is open, and even sometimes when it is closed. this has been happening for probably 6 months now I just never thought it was that big of a deal, but the last thing I want is for it to break. it trys to spin even if there isnt a disc in it..
any thoughts on what it could be or a safe way to try to fix it myself? I dont want to send it into apple they told me it was like a tear 3 repair or something and would cost wayy more than i care to spend.
I have replaced my HD before so I am familiar and not afraid to open up the mbp and work with it.
Thanks so much, any comments would be great!!!
Austin

Just a shot in the dark, but you might try a cleaning disc in it in case it thinks it's seeing a disc when none is there.
You could also check its flex cable for any damage.
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Good luck!

New disc drive and need to download all my Adobe programs again. Where to start? What to do?

Hi all, I had my damaged disc drive replaced and the shop did not re-install my programming. I need to re-install Acrobat, Bridge, and Photo Shop Elements. How do I go about this? I'm on a MacBook Pro running the latest OS Yosemite. Thanks.

Downloads available:
Suites and Programs: CC 2014 | CC | CS6 | CS5.5 | CS5 | CS4 | CS3
Acrobat: XI, X | 9,8 | 9 standard
Premiere Elements: 12 | 11, 10 | 9, 8, 7
Photoshop Elements: 12 | 11, 10 | 9,8,7
Lightroom: 5 | 4 | 3
Captivate: 8 | 7 | 6 | 5
Contribute: CS5 | CS4, CS3
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Disc drive spins and stops

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