Mini Optical Drive Issue

[pammustard]

Having a problem with the superdrive on my mini, can't seem to find any definitive info on the problem.
Issue started while trying to burn an audio cd in iTunes, blank media mounted fine in the finder, pushed burn disc in iTunes and recieved a strange error message about iTunes not being able to initialize the drive or power not getting to the drive- I've never really seen an error message like it before. The drive ejected the blank disc, and now the drive immediately ejects any disc that is inserted in it. I have tried many different kinds of discs and all of them are rejected.
I assume the drive is trashed but after reading about other people's issues with optical drives it sounds like it is more common to lose burning functions but still be able to read discs as a drive fails. I was just wondering if anyone knows of any software issue that could be causing this before I look into replacing the drive.

 

[Daniel J]

I have the same issue with my intel mac mini. I don't think I rec'd any error messages. Every time I insert a disc it just spits it out, blank or full cd/dvds. Looks like I am buying an external burner soon.

 

[Heath]

That's how my drive behaved before it died. Would read, but not burn, then read intermittently, then refused to do anything except spit disks out.
If you replace the internal drive, avoid pioneer drives, the research I did suggested they fail at higher than average rates.