Macos – disable the optical drive in the Macbook Pro through OSX

macbook promacosoptical-drive

The drive is broken and makes angry noises when it spins up, the noise is becoming a problem when using my computer in class. I'd like to disable it.

For reasons that aren't important I'd rather not have to open up the laptop and physically disable it if I don't have to.

It's a 2006 late model MBP with Snow Leopard.

Best Answer

Here's your answer on the Mac OS X Hints website:

[Remove] the IODVDStorageFamily extension (IODVDStorageFamily.kext bundle) from /System/Library/Extensions. I simply created a new folder called DisabledExtensions and dropped it there. There's also an IOCDStorageFamily extension, presumably if you're using a plain-old CD-ROM drive, you'd want to nuke that one. After moving the extension, I rebooted and confirmed that the drive no longer showed up (nor did it cause hangs) when opening System Profiler or other applications that want to interact with the optical drive.

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