MacBook Pro Optical Drive Problems

Hello Forum,
I bought a MacBook Pro on 17July2006 and soon discovered that the optical drive worked only occasionally ( It would only read a CD or DVD when it wanted to, new or old. I would read songs to Itunes on a hit or miss basis. If a CD was read into Itunes, only the first one or two songs would be converted to AAC and subsequently burned before the conversion process would hang. New programs would not be read by the optical drive.) I sent the computer back to an official Apple repair station and I was pleased to see the computer and drive repaired and fully operational in a six day turnaround.
That's the good news. The bad news is the drive crashed again last night after working only six days!!! This is my first Apple computer and so far I am not a happy camper. I've called Apple support and service and they are sending out a second service return repair carton.
Is anyone else experiencing multiple failures like this? I'm wondering if they just cleaned and/or adjusted the drive the first service appointment. I hope they replace the drive if they did not the first time. The other thought is that the optical drive is failing because of thermal issues either local to my machine or the MacBook Pro line in general.
Anyone have any thoughts or experience
aero3753
Peoria, Il US

I too have experienced these issues, and after having done a little more online research, it appears that many others have as well. My drive works on reading music CD's probably 60% of the time... Which I find to be unacceptable.
However, it hasn't become such a problem that it requires hardware work just yet. Hopefully it's merely a driver or software issue that can be resolved in the new OS.
Tom
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Message was edited by: harddrivefail

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
The best deal would be to try to recover your data before you send your Mac off to have the failing drive replaced. I gather you have most of your stuff backed up, but not the most recent emails and documents, which you really do not want to lose.
Here is something you can try. Go ahead and buy a new external hard drive--one at least the same size as your internal drive. Get a firewire cable and your friend with the other Mac. Using FireWire Target Disk Mode, mount your drive on your friend's desktop. Also mount the new drive on your friend's desktop.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661
Then use a cloning utility like Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your internal drive onto the external drive.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
You can download either of these to try out for free as often as you like. If you want to unlock Super Duper's more useful features like Smart Update, you can register a copy for $28. CCC is donation ware.
Once you have made the clone, boot from it and see that everything is OK and that all your recent data and emails are there and intact. If they are not, you may need to try a data rescue program like Data Rescue III.
The clone you create will be an exact copy of your internal drive. Once you have created the clone, you don't need to worry about your dying drive--you can let Apple replace it. When you get your Mac back, you can probably just clone back from the external drive to the internal.
It may be that the dying drive will not let you make a good clone, but you may still be able to end up with copies of your documents and files. If you are worried that the clone may be corrupted and maybe untrustworthy, you can always restore from your older backup and then just add the more recent stuff from the clone.
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