Restart and plug in your Superdrive and you should be good to go. On line 8, or between the type in ‘mbasd=1’ so it looks like this… I use Text Wrangler which is both excellent and free. Open the file with Text Edit or any other text editor. You can get to the hidden Library folder by holding down ALT when clicking on the ‘Go’ menu in a Finder window.

Mac HD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/ Navigate to this file (click image for larger view) and back it up by making a copy of it to your Desktop in case anything goes wrong. How To Make a Mac Laptop Recognise an External DVD Drive If you follow these steps you’re obviously doing this all at your own risk. External DVD drive functional happiness is all thanks to this blog for the fix.

I’ve not tested this on OS X Yosemite, but I know it works on Mountain Lion and it should work on Mavericks and in most other OS X versions I believe.

This week I had to get around this exact scenario, as it appears the internal drive is failing on my 17″ Macbook Pro (sigh), but the solution is actually very simple. If you’ve ever tried to plug in an Apple Superdrive (external DVD drive) into a Macbook Pro or other Mac laptop with an internal DVD drive, you may have struggled to get the laptop to recognise the external drive and therefore be able to use it at all. How To Use A Superdrive on a Mac Laptop With An Internal DVD Drive

Mac dvd drive internal