Help me get the MacBook Air SuperDrive to work!!

Hey guys,

Has anyone had experience with the new SuperDrives? The optical drive extensions that Apple has provided? I bought one to try to have it work with my Hackintosh but the darn thing wont even accept a disk! And I keep getting an error in the console saying "The MacBook Air SuperDrive is not supported on this Mac". Any suggestions on this matter would be helpful!

My build is:

ASUS Sabertooth x79.
Intel core i7 3930k
GTX 670 GPU
Corsaire Dominator 32GB RAM
and I'm on 10.8.2 Mountain Lion.


Thanks!

As unbelievable as it seems, someone at Apple made the decision to intentionally prevent this drive from working on all Macintosh models that actually shipped with optical drives - thus preventing the use of this drive as an alternative to an expensive service call to repair a failed internal drive.

There are two ways to make this drive work...

1) Change your SMBIOS profile to match one of the shipping macs that did not support an internal superdrive, such as new mac mini... This will allow the use of the external USB superdrive but it is not the method I recommend.

2) Edit your /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist to add "mbasd=1" to your kernel flags, for example:

<dict>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>mbasd=1</string>
</dict>

This flag stands for mac book air super drive and setting it to one causes the model specific check to be ignored. Thios will take effect on the next reboot.

Sorry for the late reply; just saw your question...

Good Luck!
-Jim

Aha!

Thank you for this solution!!

Now….to figure out this PLIST thing!


~Scott

I am also struggling with this issue.

My com.apple.Boot.plist looks like this now:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>mbasd=1</string>
</dict>
</plist>

But my mac book air superdrive is still not working. What can i do?
It is working on my MacBookPro.

OSX 10.8.5

Nobody?

Fokke said:

Nobody?

Click to expand...

Bump!

Solved. But it gave me problems later. I couldn't mount FAT32 volumes after this. So please, don't do this.


I had to do a kext edit as it's written here:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20111107064435227

For the modification itself, a file editor (I useHex Fiend) and a tool that simplifies the update of .kext files are needed. I use Kext Utility (search for the correct version for your OS version), but it can be done by hand or with others.

We have to edit a driver file, as follows:

• Go to /System/Library/Extensions/, right-click on AppleStorageDrivers.kext and choose 'Show package contents.'
• Then go to /Contents/PlugIns/, right-click on AppleUSBODD.kext and choose 'Show package contents' on that file.
• Then go to /Contents/MacOS/ and edit the file AppleUSBODD with Hex Fiend.
• By searching the file, you should find two chains of this type: Supported Mac Models MacBookAir Macmini Macmini1 Macmini2.
• You must replace one of the values by your model identifier. In my case, I simply replaced MacBookAir by MacBookPro to keep a file of the same length. Pay attention to spaces, do not put any between MacBook and Pro. Normally, just use the beginning of the identifier and it should be enough, so : MacBook, MacPro, iMac, etc. Also pay attention to capital letters.
• Once it is done on the two chains, just save and replace the original file AppleStorageDrivers.kext by the new. If everything is OK, Mac OS X will ask for a password.
• Then launch Kext Utility to clear caches and repair permissions, and restart the Mac. If everything went well -- this was the case on my MacBook Pro -- the external drive should work right away.

​

I could only find one occurence of this supported models, but it did the job. Remember to repair permissions afterwards. I replaced Imac3 for MacPro

I looked in that kext and all of the descriptions of macs were already in there, including MacPro, so I wasn't sure what to do?!

Well I think changing my Hackintosh identifier code for the Mac Pro to the latest version (ie. the one without a superdrive) has made it allowed to appear. But when I plug it in now it gives an error that the SuperDrive needs power and to plug it into one of the ports on the mac. But I am plugging it in directly to the Hackintosh... Have tried all the ports...

Any thoughts?

Got it working. Had to plug it in to a USB 3 port to get it to work. Dunno why. DVD player doesn't work, it says can't initialise. But VLC and Toast seem to work fine. Wohoo!