For those of you who may have purchased Apple's spiffy $79 external CD/DVD burner (or Superdrive as they call it), it may not have worked when you plugged it into your older Mac. A lot of times a person's built-in optical drive fails, and they see the new external at the Apple Store. They naturally grab one assuming it'll work because they'll be using it with a Mac. Hopefully there's a "Genius" selling it to them who's going to ask which Mac they plan on using it with. I'd think probably not. It turns out it's only the fairly newer Macs that support it.
When you plug it in, your older Mac might very well inform you that "This Apple External CD/DVD drive is not compatible with this Mac. Please go to Apple Support to read more." What they show you is a compatibility matrix that seems to makes no sense. I haven't compared every spec of every Mac they list, but 2009 seems to be the general cutoff.
Perhaps Apple requires USB 3, and the not-so-old models only have USB 2, but my response to that would be "so what?" You're burning an
optical disc, the slowest consumer media still standing. USB 2, as relatively slow as it is nowadays, is plenty fast enough to burn a disc. So, what to do?
This is OSX, and so this is UNIX. There is a single terminal command to make one change in your NVRAM settings that removes the restriction. This is much more preferable than doing things like modifying kernel extensions with text editors, which can be dangerous and is not for the average user.
This is OSX, and so this is UNIX. There is a single terminal command to make one change in your NVRAM settings that removes the restriction. This is much more preferable than doing things like modifying kernel extensions with text editors, which can be dangerous and is not for the average user.
As always, I cannot stress enough the importance of having a full backup before performing
any modifications to the System. It's technically a hack, but a harmless one. Still...
*****PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK*****
Now that we have that out of the way, here's how. It really does takes a matter of seconds:
Open the app called Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities), and type the following exactly as shown:
sudo nvram boot-args="mbasd=1"
Press Return, enter your Admin password, and press Return again (you cannot perform this command without being an Admin and knowing your password). If it returns to a blank prompt, you did it.
sudo nvram boot-args="mbasd=1"
Press Return, enter your Admin password, and press Return again (you cannot perform this command without being an Admin and knowing your password). If it returns to a blank prompt, you did it.
Restart your Mac, and voilà! Now, in case your internal burner dies, instead of a costly replacement, you too can grab an Apple external CD/DVD burner for just $79 without worrying if it'll work on your particular Mac.
Please keep in mind this is for OS X, and will definitely not work on the much older Macs that run the Classic MacOS. I am not sure how many previous versions of OSX for which this command will function, so your mileage may vary, but I have personally verified it works perfectly under Mavericks (10.9.3) on a Mid/Late 2007 15" Macbook Pro, and others have verified it on various other models. It would be interesting to see which is the oldest model Mac it can work on. Perhaps even a G4 tower running 10.4 Tiger could do it. It's worth investigating.
Finally, remember that if you ever reinstall a fresh OS X on that Mac, you may have to reapply the terminal command. You may even have to reapply it if the NVRAM gets reset. For more in-depth info on what NVRAM and PRAM are, check out: <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US>;.
Happy Mac'ing!
Paul K.
The Mac Doc
Comments