BACK UP DISK FOR MAC USB SUPERDRIVE FOR MAC OS X
BACK UP DISK FOR MAC USB SUPERDRIVE MAC OS X

The driver recognizes a boot parameter named 'mbasd' (Mac Book Air Super Drive), which sets a flag in the driver which both overrides the check for the MBA and also tweaks something related to USB power management (the superdrive probably needs more power than regular USB allows). For those interested in the nitfy details of disassembling and hex code patching, the first approach is still documented here.ДЇor actually making the SuperDrive work in clean and easy way, just read on (but note: while it has proven to be a quite safe method, still you'll be doing this entirely on your own risk! Using sudo and editing system files incorrectly can damage things severely!).ДЄpparently, Apple engineers had the need to test the superdrive with non-MacBookAir computers themselves, so the driver already has an option built-in to work on officially unsupported machines! All you need to do is enable that option, as follows:

BACK UP DISK FOR MAC USB SUPERDRIVE MAC OS X

This drive only works for Macs which, in their original form, do not have an optical drive.ДЄt this point, I started to search the net, finding hints, disassembling Mac OS X USB drivers and finally patching code in a hex editor which was the first, but ugly, solution to make the superdrive work, and gave me the information to eventually find the second, much nicer solution presented below. I knew that many third-party USB optical drives work fine, so I just assumed that would be the same for the Apple drive. It just didn't occur to me that this thing could possibly not just work with any Mac, so I didn't even ask before buying. And I didn't want to carry that around, so I left it at home and bought a shiny new MacBook Air SuperDrive (by 2012, Apple USB SuperDrive) for the office.

To be able to continue using the SuperDrive (Apple's name for the CD/DVD read/write drive), the Optibay came with an external USB case which worked fine, but was ugly. The story is this - a while ago I replaced the built-in optical disk drive in my MacBook Pro 17' by an OptiBay (in the meantime, there are also alternatives) which allows to connect a second harddrive, or in my case, a SSD.

BACK UP DISK FOR MAC USB SUPERDRIVE FOR MAC OS X

Note: for Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan and later, please see this updated post instead.

Back up disk for mac usb superdrive