Make a SuperDrive Work on Unsupported Macs? Its Possible!

Make a SuperDrive Work on Unsupported Macs? Its Possible!

The is an external CD / DVD drive that reads and writes to optical discs, and while it works great with many Macs, there are some Mac models where the SuperDrive doesnt work, like any Mac that happened to come with a built-in optical drive. For the computers that do not support the SuperDrive, connecting the device often pops-up an error message stating that the Superdrive is not supported on this Mac. Before giving up on using a SuperDrive, you might be able to use a command line hack method discussed here to make a Superdrive work on any Mac, whether its supported or not. Of course there is no need to do this on supported machines but for devices where the drive isnt working, it can be helpful. The approach detailed in this article will be modifying a Macs firmware nvram by using the command line, thus its only appropriate for advanced users. Like everything else, proceed at your own risk, and backup your Mac before beginning. This should work to enable an Apple External SuperDrive to function as expected on a Mac which is otherwise not supported, but your results may vary. Let us know in the comments below if this trick worked for you. If you decide you want to reverse this adjustment, or if you find this approach didnt work and you want to return to defaults nvram setting for that reason or any other, you can during system start or from the command line too. Either approach will remove the mbasd=1 variable from firmware settings on the Mac. Its not entirely clear where the original source of this nvram command comes from, but I discovered it in a bit of a web rabbit hole after following a comment left led to a thread on and an official , which outlines getting a SuperDrive working on unsupported Macs, and which Macs do and dont support the SuperDrive. Apparently any Mac without an optical drive built-in should support a superdrive, but some users manually remove their optical drives to use the space for an additional hard drive, and sometimes a built-in optical drive fails too, thus leading to scenarios where such a command would be useful to enable support for the SuperDrive. For reference, Apple says the SuperDrive works with the following Macs: Oh and if youre wondering about getting an Apple SuperDrive to work in BootCamp or with Windows in general, youll want to , which applies to Boot Camp as well as a general PC. Did this trick work to enable SuperDrive functionality for you? Do you have any other tips, tricks, or suggestions on getting an Apple SuperDrive to work on an unsupported Mac? Share your experiences in the comments below!