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Tonight my 2019 MacBook Pro mysteriously stopped working correctly with my external (USB3) DVD drive. However, I know the drive is fine because my Windows machine and my old 2016 MacBook Pro can use it without issue.

Not sure what happened, but after spinning up the disc, my Mac OS didn't have the disc mounted. This time I had the drive plugged into a USB 2.0 hub (which I don't normally use), so I pulled it out of that and moved it to the USB-c port and tried again. This time it didn't spin at all and instead made a steady soft "click... click... click" sound. And now that's all it will do on this Mac, no matter which port or USB3-to-c adapter I try.

I hypothesize that my MacBook's driver for this DVD drive is now in some kind of faulty state (maybe due to the USB 2 hub or the act of hot-unplugging it from that), but I cannot figure out how to make the OS "forget" this drive and try it fresh.

I have reset the NVRAM, and it didn't do anything.

When I look at the USB section of System Information, I see like 100 instances of my DVD drive, and every time I refresh it, there's more. So Mac OS is clearly doing something wrong. Seems like it keeps trying to init the drive, fails, and then tries again without clearing the previous attempt:

System Information -> USB

Anyone know what I can try now?

Answers to questions:

1. Have you tried using all of the different USB ports available on the Mac

Yes.

2. Can you open terminal.app, run the following command, and attach the output to this question: diskutil list

Here you go:

1168 ~$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI ⁨EFI⁩                     314.6 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS ⁨Container disk1⁩         1.0 TB     disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +1.0 TB     disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume ⁨Macintosh HD⁩            15.3 GB    disk1s1
   2:              APFS Snapshot ⁨com.apple.os.update-...⁩ 15.3 GB    disk1s1s1
   3:                APFS Volume ⁨Macintosh HD - Data⁩     202.7 GB   disk1s2
   4:                APFS Volume ⁨Preboot⁩                 474.6 MB   disk1s3
   5:                APFS Volume ⁨Recovery⁩                622.9 MB   disk1s4
   6:                APFS Volume ⁨VM⁩                      2.1 GB     disk1s5
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  • 1. Have you tried using all of the different USB ports available on the Mac, 2. Can you open terminal.app, run the following command, and attach the output to this question: diskutil list
    – Scottmeup
    Commented Jun 29, 2021 at 5:37
  • 1
    Updated with answers. Also included a shot of my System Information->USB, and a new observation.
    – Grant Birchmeier
    Commented Jun 29, 2021 at 12:55
  • Did you ever get anywhere with this?
    – Jonathan
    Commented Mar 22, 2023 at 16:43
  • I think I found one specific USB->USB-C adapter that lets it work. It used to work with any adapter, but I don't know what changed.
    – Grant Birchmeier
    Commented Apr 3, 2023 at 3:05

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