How can I get my DVD drive to work?

Hi iFixit team,

Firstly, I just wanted to say how much I love this website. I know very little about computers but with the help of this website I have upgraded this laptop including to having much better RAM and replacing the HDD with an SSD drive, which means it runs so much better than it did when I bought it!

For the past year or so, however, my optical drive has stopped working. It takes in discs fine, makes a noise as if trying to read them and then just spits them out. I’ve tried cleaning the drive to no avail. I’m keen to see if I can fix this issue as I still have a lot of DVDs, or to discover if it is futile and therefore need to replace the drive with a second hard drive.

I recently bought a replacement CD/DVD drive from eBay and fitted it with the amazing iFixit guide. Frustratingly, despite my excitement at it making noises when I put in a disc (and the rest of the laptop not having been screwed up by me), it’s doing the same thing: noises that sound like attempts to read a disc and then it spits it back out. I’ve tried this with multiple discs with no success.

I’m now starting to wonder if this could be something to do with the laptop operating system/firmware interaction (again I am a computer novice and only vaguely know what these terms mean). I’m running High Sierra 10.13.6 and have disabled upgrades as I don’t want to run into the graphics & compatibiltiy issues that happened when I upgraded to Mojave (I then uninstalled and downgraded back to High Sierra). I tried downloading the SMC firmware update (1.8) from Mac for Mid 2012 Macbook Pro from here: Mac laptop patched and updates but when I tried to install this on my system it said this software is not supported on this system.

Is this likely to be a problem with the disc drive, or a problem with firmware, or the operating system? Is there anything I can do to fix it and use my DVD drive again?

Any thoughts or advice would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks iFixit community! Donald