Many people don’t realize their optical drive has failed until they need to install a new piece of software or are having their computer evaluated for trade-in. After all, more and more software titles are moving towards download-only, and the App Store is evidence that this trend is only gaining momentum. As with fans and hard drives, optical drives are one of the few mechanical devices within your computer that can fail logically or physically. A logical failure would be when the drive itself is not recognized by the computer, and a physical failure would be where the drive doesn’t accept disks, scratches disks, etc.
If you must install software immediately and your optical drive is broken, you could always use Remote Disk using your network and another Mac. To begin, insert the disk into the Mac with the working optical drive. Then open System Preferences and select the Sharing preference pane. In there you will want to click on the DVD or CD Sharing box that appears first in the list. There is a secondary check box there that you can check to require your authorization before a remote Mac accesses your optical drive.
With sharing turned on, turn your attention to the Mac requiring the software installation. Fire up Terminal and paste in the following commands exactly as they appear,pressing return between each command:
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true
After entering the commands in Terminal, you can either restart the machine, log out and back in, or type “killall Finder” in Terminal. The next time you open a Finder window, Remote Disk will appear under the devices in the side bar. Click on Remote Disk, and it will post a request to the machine sharing the drive asking whether or not the connection and usage is to be allowed. Install your new Applications or import your new music. To remove the disk sharing option on the unit with the failed drive, simply enter the terminal commands once again and substitute false for true, and it will disable the practice once again. Don’t forget, you’ll need to log out and back in, restart your computer, or reboot the Finder by typing “killall Finder” in Terminal before any changes will become effective.