I bought my Mac Mini in late 2006 and have had very few problems with it up until recently. I installed Boot Camp with Windows XP on the computer and have been using both operating systems fairly equally until the Windows XP operating system stopped working correctly. I decided it would be best to back up my data and reformat, so I erased the Windows XP partition and am currently trying to make the partition again. Heres the problem: Whenever I insert the Windows XP install CD (or any CD - music or not) it just displays as 'blank cd/disc' and when I try clicking it, the Mac Mini says there is nothing on the disc. I have tried burning the Windows XP operating system to several discs as well to see if my copy was faulty, and yet it will not work. How should I go about fixing this? Thanks.
Mac Mini reads all CDs as blank
- Thread starter xMazz
- Start date
scott_billings
Registered
Sorry to say, but it sounds like your optical drive is dead or dying. Considering it lasted over 3 years, give or take, that's actually not too bad. Not sure why it's not more common knowledge that optical drives tend to crap out after a fairly short while.
If the DVD laser still works, you could probably just burn the XP CD onto a DVD, but this will be a stopgap measure at best. It's not really worth the money to replace the internal drive, so I'd start looking into externals. Should be plenty around with the whole netbook craze.
If the DVD laser still works, you could probably just burn the XP CD onto a DVD, but this will be a stopgap measure at best. It's not really worth the money to replace the internal drive, so I'd start looking into externals. Should be plenty around with the whole netbook craze.
Common knowledge? I have never before heard tell of this happening--not on any computer that I own, not on any computer that I have used, not on any computer that I have ever heard of, not MacOS, not MacOS X, not any other flavor of Unix, not any version of Windows, not any distribution of Linux.
scott_billings
Registered
And yet, optical drives die all the time in computers and game consoles. It has nothing to do with the OS, it's just that the hardware itself fails. No offense, but your personal experience in no way represents the experience of everyone else. I personally have repaired probably a few dozen systems (Dell and Apple) where the drive would not read discs anymore, or would do so unreliably. Slap in a new drive, and the problem goes away immediately. You do the math.
djackmac
ACMT
I've repaired at least a few thousand Apple systems and if you are talking about non unibody macbook pros then your assessment is correct. But there are other Apple systems such as the iMac G5s, and even with all of their faults I have yet to have seen one with a bad optical drive. Mac Minis are not at all known for faulty optical drives (although I've seen a few with noisy drives), but the symptoms do sound like it could be.
To the OP. Put your OSX install DVD in the drive then boot up holding the option key to boot manager and see if the install disk is seen as a startup volume or if the disk just gets ejected.
scott_billings
Registered
It's really more of an issue of sooner or later the laser emitter gives out, or the focusing lens warps. Just normal wear and tear, not a defect in workmanship.