Imac 2009 external DVD drive

hi everyone.
My 2009 Imac DVD drive is damaged and spits out discs (daughter stuck a memory card in it and damaged it apparently). Bought an Apple Superdrive but its not compatible with an Imac with the built in drive!! Can anyone recommend an alternative external DVD drive to buy. Is it best to get one with a Thunderbolt conection, or is USB ok?
Advice needed please!
thank

Here are two on Amazon.com that are cheap and Mac compatible
http://www.amazon.com/LG-GP10NB20-Portable-External-Drive/dp/B004K2Z4MS/ref=sr_1 _3?ie=UTF8&qid=1398883289&sr=8-3&keywords=Mac+compatible+external+LG+optical+dr i ve
http://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-Portable-External-GP40NB40/dp/B009DS6OFU/re f=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1398883289&sr=8-7&keywords=Mac+compatible+external+LG+opti c al+drive
Here's another source for Mac compatible optical drives. These are better quality optical drives.
These are also tray loading drives.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/VLU2SD24XS/
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3F82SD24S/
Good Luck!

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Restore iMac from external dvd drive

I'm giving my iMac to a friend. But my superdrive is is failing to read the restore disks, but not after wiping the HD.
Now my G4 iMac wont do a thing.
I had assumed that my external DVD drive would do, but it stops on the small mac icon and goes no further.
Is there a work-around I can do? You'd be helping a retired photographer to leave his ancient PC and give my gorgeous G4 iMac a new home. While I get on with my iMac 20' intel.
The G4 last run on Tiger.

Put the Intel into Target Disk Mode with the G4's installer disc in the drive.
[How to use FireWire target disk mode|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583] includes description of hardware and software requirements.
Boot the G4 while holding down the option key. If you're lucky the installer disc will appear as a boot option and you can reinstall the OS onto the G4's drive.
Oh, connect the two computers with a Firewire cable!

Boot iMac from external DVD drive

Hi guys!
I need to boot my iMac to my system disc using an external DVD drive (USB).
I put the DVD in the drive and it shows up in Prefs as a bootable disc but when I select it and tell it to restart it gives me the error beep. I've tried rebooting and holding down "option" but the system disc in the external doesn't show up.
I'm on 10.3.9 on a 17" G5 iMac 1.8GHz. All ancient history I know but I really only use it for surfing the web and iTunes. I'm trying to upgrade to 10.5 but I need to get it to boot to the DVD drive using the original system disc first.
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Thank you!!

Intel Macs can boot from USB external drives (including optical drives) just fine. It's the older PowerPC Macs that usually need external drives to be FireWire, in order for it to be bootable.
You may want to look at Mac-oriented vendor OWC to see what they have
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/optical-drives/

How do I install Tiger on a G3 iMAC from an external DVD drive?

I want to install Tiger on my PPC G3 iMAC. It is 500MHZ with 512 MB Ram, running 10.3.9. It has a CD drive, but CD version of Tiger is no longer available. I purchased a retail version of Tiger, and, on the advice of the Apple Store personnel, purchased an external DVD drive. It is a USB Lacie drive. My iMAC sees the DVD, but when I click the Install icon, it has a Restart button. Clicking the button restarts for 10.3.9. Same thing happens when I use the "C" key. When I try to assign the DVD drive as the startup drive, it says "ding" and won't assign it. What can I do next?

Take the DVD drive back and exchange it for a Firewire model. You cannot boot the iMac from a USB drive. This is basic information your Apple store personnel should know unless you failed to tell them what Mac model you have.

IMac - external DVD drive crashes Aimersoft DVD Ripping program

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Peter,Welcome to Apple Discussions.
Here are some alternative choices for playing DVDs.
If the LaCie drive USB or FW?
Tiger is serious improvement over 10.1 (although you may need some more RAM) I'm not sure whether it will cure the DVD player issue? If you still have space (9Gb) on your 40Gb drive you could use Mac the Ripper, and then open the VIDEO_TS file in DVD Player.
mrtotes

How do I Install CS5 that is on a DVD/cd that I purchased years ago onto my new iMac that doesn't have a DVD drive? Hoping to avoid purchasing an extern DVD drive.

How do I Install CS5 that is on a DVD/cd that I purchased years ago onto my new iMac that doesn't have a DVD drive? Hoping to avoid purchasing an extern DVD drive.

You can download the CS5 installer from Download and Installation Help
Install then enter your serial number.

Trying to wipe the hard drive on a G5 iMac, using an external DVD drive as the one in the iMac is broken.

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So far there is no way to "begin the install process", I just keep going around in circles with this. I'm doing this so I can sell the computer. I hope I've made it clear, and TIA for any advice.

I looked at the disk utility erase option. The wording looked a little vague. Seemed to me to erase all the disk including the data if you pick one pass, but I am not sure.
but that is contradicted when you see you have to pick the correct option.

How can I get computer to use external DVD drive?I have a HP dvd640 plug in play drive I want to ude but my iMac dosen't see it as connected.

How can I get *computer* to use external DVD drive? (1.8 GHz PowerPC G5 Version 10.3.9)

Place cd/dvd in drive. cd/dvd icon will show on desktop.
How can I get computer to use external DVD drive?I have a HP dvd640 plug in play drive I want to ude but my iMac dosen't see it as connected.
What is ude?
How is it connected? firewire or usb?
When connected it should appear in system profiler.
blue apple > about this mac > more info button. Click on the hardware line. It has a little triangle in front of the work hardware.
look for firewire or usb.
Robert

I have an imac 2009 the disk drive is damaged and I have lost the passwords I need to reset passwords I tried booting with a macosx disk from an external hard drive but did not read the drive how else can I reset password ?

I have an imac 2009 the disk drive is damaged and I have lost the passwords I need to reset passwords I tried booting with a macosx disk from an external hard drive but did not read the drive how else can I reset password ?
I have a 2012 mac book pro can I use that to connect with firewire and load osx that way? and how woudl I do that?
Thanks so much!

To what password are you referring? Do you mean your user account's admin password? Or do you mean the master password for File Vault or do you mean a Firmware Password?
For an admin password:
Forgot Your Account Password
For Snow Leopard and earlier
     Mac OS X 10.6- If you forget your administrator password
For Lion/Mountain Lion
    Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
     When the menubar appears select Terminal from the Utilities menu.
     Enter resetpassword at the prompt and press RETURN. Follow
     instructions in the dialog window that will appear.
     Or see Reset a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Password and
     OS X Lion- Apple ID can be used to reset your user account password.
If you cannot do the above then try this:
1. Boot to Safe Mode by restarting and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND-S keys until a black screen with white type appears.
2. At the prompt, type the following commands pressing return after each command line:
     /sbin/fsck -yf
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     you do. If after seven tries you still do not receive a "Filesystem OK" message,
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     mount -uw /
     cd /private/var/db/netinfo
     mv local.nidb local.old
     rm ../.AppleSetupDone
     shutdown -r now
The second-to-last command above will cause OS X to think that the operating system is newly installed, and when the new owner starts up the computer it will send him/her to the startup wizard where he/she can start a new user without reinstalling.
This last method does not actually change a password. It simply removes the user accounts and lets you create an initial admin account as if the computer were new out of the box.
How to reset the OS X password without a startup CD:
Reboot into Single-user Mode. Enter the following and press RETURN after each command line
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I have never tried this method myself.

What external dvd drive is compatible with IMAC with optical drive

what external drive is compatiblee with IMAC with optical driv

As far as my experience goes I have had all external dvd drives work throu USB, the USB stands for Universal Seriel Bus and that means the drives are already in the device, so you can probably just go to best buy or to new egg and order a cheap one.
If you have usb 3.0 I would go with that since its one of the faster ones and you will save money on using a thunder bolt device, and trust me a $17 dvd player works just as good as a $120 dvd player.

Macbook pro external DVD drive initialization error 70012

This is an answer to my own question and a comment about finding answers to questions on Apple forums.
The situation
I have a Macbook Pro, late-2009 model. In 2013, the internal DVD or optical drive died. I purchased an Apple external DVD drive to be able to read DVD disks, listen to audio, and watch video content. Because the computer I own was built to read only the internal DVD drive, it did not recognize this new external drive. When I plugged it in, I received an error: A valid DVD drive could not be found [-70012]. Or , or DVD could not be found, initialization error[- 70012].
The question
Given this situation, my question was, how do I solve DVD initialization error 70012?
The answer
Since my Apple Care plan had long since expired, before spending time and money at the Apple store to solve this, I decided to look online. After searching general sites and more and more specific sites, I found several posts on forums about my problem. The most helpful of these, with respect to an external DVD drive, was posted on CNET, by Topher Kessler (June 10, 2011 2:24 PM PDT):
http://www.cnet.com/news/addressing-dvd-player-error-70012-when-using-external-d rives-in-os-x/
The key to his advice was twofold:
1. Hardware: The Macbook Pro was programmed to recognize the internal DVD/optical drive alone.
2. Software: The preferences in the Macbook Pro were set to open Apple's DVD Player when a disc is inserted into the drive.
To play audio or video discs on an external drive, the computer needed to be instructed to recognize the external drive, plus appropriate software needed to be opened. Mr. Kessler's advice went from hardware (i.e., get a new internal drive), to software (i.e., use different audio or video software), to operating system (i.e., alter the code in the operating system). Like with Goldie Locks, the first was too expensive, the last was too invasive, but the middle option was just right.
I searched for free software to display audio and video on my external drive and found two that could do the job quite nicely. There are others, but these seemed to be the most recognized and highly rated:
1. MPlayerX (http://mplayerx.org/download.html)
2. VLC Media Player (http://download.cnet.com/mac/media-players/?rpp=30)
So, I didn't have to buy an internal DVD drive and I didn't have to alter the code of the operating system. I just needed to download free software, install, and play.
The points to learn
1. Computers involve both hardware and software, therefore solutions to computer problems can require fixes to one, the other, or both.
2. The simplest solution, and the least expensive, is to be preferred over the more complex.
3. What went wrong for someone else is not necessarily what happened to your computer or software.
4. What solved someone else's problem may not solve your problem.
5. Just because nobody has posted information on how to solve your problem doesn't mean there isn't a solution to it.

Hi Duane,
Thanks for the info! That's some catch-22 for DVD Player... but useful info. I guess I'll just pick up a generic DVD-ROM to replace the drive with.
As to the external drive, do not USB 2.0 cases run at the same speeds at Firewire 400 cases? (the same drive has no issues on other machines for playing dvds... just the lampshade iMac)

All users GONE except for "Other"...and CANNOT boot from External DVD drive

I booted the iMac (Intel...the last one with the White Bezel) tonight, and all of my users were GONE except for "Other." The internal Superdrive has had a disc jammed in it for months, so instead I have an OWC external USB/FW400/FW800 DVD drive. Snow Leaopard.
I need to boot from the SL install disc, but that must go into the external drive...which, as it's been since I upgraded to SL, the Mac sometimes sees and sometimes doesn't. Right now it can't see it. Which leaves me a big pile of crap, doesn't it?
So, what to do? I can't boot the internal drive because it's jammed with a DVD (or I spend $300 to replace what should be a $20 optical drive in it), I can't boot the external DVD drive because the iMac w/Snow Lepeord can't see it, and, meanwhile, all of my photos, etc., are on my Time Machine backup drive...which, as long as I can't do any of the above, just sits there...useless.
Can you tell I'm a bit frustrated with this?
I've reset the PRAM. I've rebooted. I've held down all sorts of combinations of keys. I've tried every single interface type on the external drive and the same thing - the drive can't be seen by the computer.
Has the internal hard drive failed? Nope. I'm tying this using the Firefox browser that's running on my Windows XP installation via Boot Camp on the internal hard drive.

Thanks, but no luck so far.
I have an old iMac G3 downstairs, and I connected it to the machine via Firewire. I could see the disk on the 24" iMac, its folders, etc. I wanted to see if I could install OS X via Target Disk Mode from the old machine to the new one, but it's a PowerPC machine and you can't do that. Maybe you can't do that from ANY iMac...I'm not that experienced.
Now the iMac isn't booting at all to Windows via Boot Camp - it's been booting for 45 minutes now with the "WinXP" logo, but nothing. I'm about to throw it in the car and haul it over to my parents, who have both a Powerbook and a 27" iMac. Maybe it'll work there. Who knows.
Other ideas...replace the internal hard drive (cheap)...if that doesn't work, I'll just sell the thing. I'm not going to sink $300 into the thing when I can get a new machine for around $600-$700. I may go to a Windows7 machine on the desktop and a Powerbook...maybe even an iPad.
I really want to love this iMac. It's my first (well, I did have the G3, but that was just to play with) Mac. It's given me a ton of problems since I bought it new. It's always been a "stock" machine - nothing weird done to it. I was hit with an iMovie update once, and that broke iMovie. Even the new iLife 2009 didn't fix it. Then, the internal optical disk drive failed. I couldn't believe that Apple used a proprietary optical drive rather than a stock Pioneer model. Price for the drive alone? $200.
I installed Snow Leopard 2 months ago, and that completely broke my ability to use external optical drives. Sometimes they work...most times they don't. This is an ongoing problem that many people are having (check the forums)...but no fix. Where does that leave me? With a useless computer.
So, I've boiled it down to this: I love the Mac software. I hate the hardware. Sure, it's pretty, but if something goes wrong, get ready to pay. I hate that Apple knows about problems, yet does nothing to address them, like the problem with external optical drives and Snow Leopard.
I bought the Mac because I was sick of Microsoft not being able to simply produce an OS full of security holes. Often times I read people bashing supposed "driver ****" with Windows, but look at what users of Windows machine are demanding of Microsoft - "please make my software compatible with the trillions of combinations of hardware that can run the os...all the way back to stuff that was created in the mid 1990s." Meanwhile, from my experience, Apple can't get their software to work with their own proprietary, supposedly vertically-controlled hardware.
Windows7 is a not bad OS. It's got it's faults, of course. But, if my optical drive failed in a Windows box, I'd have it replaced in 10 minutes...with a bluray drive...that can write...for under $100.
I use my computer for pictures, etc. In fact, we were ready to send off to iPhoto for our yearly photo books. That's not going to happen, as the photos are forever trapped on my Time Machine backup drive (lesson learned: dump photos to a generic format...fat32 works...just in case you decide to switch from Mac to Win7). iLife is great. MS Office is great, too, on the Mac. I love the little things the Mac does right.
After years of screwing around with my Windows box, I wanted a computer that acted like a consumer electronic device. That's not what I've gotten.
Ugh, so now do I buy a Mac Mini for $700, a new iMac for $1,400, or a Macbook Pro and a mac mini?
...or...do I continue to work within this silly Ubuntu Linux world?
Whatever the answer, I wish I didn't have to ask the question now.

Internal DVD drive is shot. Can I install SL from an external DVD drive?

Hi folks, a quick (well actually a few) questions.
I've had my imac since early '06. It's currently running Tiger, and I'd like to install Snow Leopard. The problem is that the internal DVD drive is shot. It's been occasionally refusing to accept DVDs for a while now, and now it has a DVD stuck in it (not mounted), which I can't get out via terminal, rebooting, or jiggling it (technical term I know).
Now, I'm going to assume that getting apple to replace the DVD drive will be more expensive than just grabbing an external drive, especially as I'll most probably only use it once. The question is, if I grab a cheap external DVD drive, will I be able to install Snow Leopard with it? Or will Tiger not recognise it as a boot drive?
Many thanks,
Chris
p.s. Also, I'm using a cheapo windows style keyboard (will be replacing asap), and I'm wondering if this is why I can't see bootable drives when holing option on startup?

Yes, you can install from an external drive, although I wouldn’t go for a cheap one. There are good, relatively inexpensive, drives out there. And you are going to need that option key to select the install disk as your startup. I believe there is a corresponding key on a PC keyboard, but I don’t know what it is (maybe Alt?). I’m sure someone can jump in here and tell us.

Trying to install iwork '09 from dvd on new imac with no dvd drive.....iwork is brand new (bought off ebay) in unopened box....I have at my disposal an older imac with dvd drive and a 16GB thumb drive...what is best way to load iwork on the new imac?

bought my mom a new imac this xmas...didn't realize it has no dvd drive....just picked up a new unopened version of iwork '09 for her to use off of ebay....need to get it loaded on the new dvddriveless imac......I have an imac at my house with a drive and a thumb drive i could bring over to her house if I could somehow burn an image of the iwork dvd on the thumb drive...is this possible? is there a better solution other than buying an external dvd drive?

First use Disk Utilty to make a disk image of the iWork disc on your iMac. Then there are two easy ways to install on your mothers new iMac. One is to copy to your USB thumb drive, visit your mother and install from the thumb drive. The other is to use a free upload and download service like www.wetransfer.com. Upload the .dmg disk image via www.wetransfer.com, then your mother downloads and installs. After installation you'll need to update iWork for Mountain Lion compatibility.

Is it possible to install Tiger using an external DVD drive?

I have one the of the first iMacs and at the time I thought I didn't need a DVD Player. However, now I was thinking of buying an external DVD player/burner. Is it possible to upgrade to Tiger using the external DVD drive since I don't have an internal one?

Hi Celticart,
Welcome to the discussions.
I have an old AGP PowerMac G4 to which I have hooked an external Firewire DVD Drive. I have installed Tiger without any problems, using this drive. I see no reason why it couldn't be done on an iMac as well, (provided it has Firewire).
I don't think you could get it to work using an external drive hooked up via USB.
Cheers!
Karl

Imac 2009 external DVD drive

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