Mac Linux DVD Troubleshooting Primer Tutorial

Mac Linux DVD Troubleshooting Primer Tutorial

Troubleshooting is a term familiar to anybody supporting a product. That product in the Information Technology world can be hardware or software. We find the times when we are most seeking a “troubleshooting” piece of advice is when, perhaps (sometimes you don’t know), software fails on a piece of hardware.

So it was with a baffling thing that happened the other day on my Apple MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 with a malfunctioning DVD-R player model Matshita DVD-R UL-898. See how detailed we are getting.

That comes in handy when troubleshooting. Yet again, as in so many Information Technology matters, we reach to the search engines for help. Let’s summarize the whole situation from problem through to resolution … you’ll see that it suits a flow chart mentality, as many troubleshooting scenarios do …

1. Identify Issue: There’s a problem … the DVD won’t “seat” itself into the DVD player on our MacBook Pro (flowchart oval)
2. Do you have any prior knowledge? (flowchart diamond) Yes-> Go down that route (flowchart oval) No-> Formulate a good search engine query (flowchart oval)
3. Come up with macbook pro cannot seat dvd (flowchart oval)
4. First link led to superdrive won’t draw discs in Apple forum webpage, which was scoured for information from this grateful reader (flowchart oval)
5. Often it pans out, and it eventually also did in this case, that the last paragraph is a doozy (ie. good) (because it is last (ie. it stops other advice because it is so good (and succinct))) and we followed the advice of Re: superdrive won’t draw discs in (flowchart oval)
6. Access “About This Mac” up at Apple top left desktop icon (flowchart oval)
7. Click “System Report…” button (flowchart oval)
8. Click “Disc Burning” option under “Hardware” section of options and saw that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the hardware, so surmised it could be a software (interface to hardware) issue (flowchart oval)
9. Opened Mac application called “Terminal” that leads to a Linux (Bash environment) prompt (flowchart oval)
10. Tried typing “drutil eject” while DVD is loose, and saw that this did nothing untoward (but didn’t fix issue … here, though, just wanted to test “drutil eject” … which I’d never used before) (flowchart oval)
11. Tried typing “drutil eject” exactly while DVD is pushed right into the player with a thin piece of pushing cardboard, and saw that this fixed the issue (flowchart oval)

Thanks Open Source community … again!

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