Can I use the AirSuperDrive as an External Drive the Mac laptops?

Yes you can!

The previously statement from our colleague "mayer" it's not accurate.

Apparently Apple protects our MacBook's of make use of a MacBook Air SuperDrive.

I found an easy way to make it. I have replaced my optical drive by a 750GB storage memory and I use to rip and copy DVD's of movies to a MPEG4 format for my little son watch in his iPad and suddenly I found myself without a DVD reader. My wife has a MacBook Air and an external MacBookAir SuperDrive, I have connected it to my MacBook and nothing. So, I found the way below to sort my problem!

However, following the below it is entirely your own risk!

Please bear in mind that I have done it making use of a MacBook Pro mid 2010 running Mac OSX 10.7.4. I haven't tried it on any other system!

Please make it carefully, you'll be hacking your system. You'll be working on the command line. BE CAREFUL, TYPE SLOWLY, CHECK YOUR TYPING! It seems easy but, if you do some wrong typing you can crack down all of your system.

Here we go:

1 - Open your Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal)

2 - type the following as a single line, please note that there is 1 space in between sudo and pico and /Library...

sudo pico /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

3 - You'll be asking to type your administrator password (you'll notice that you'll not see the typing!) - make it and hit enter

4 - the following will come up:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1...>

<plist version=”1.0″>

<dict>

<key>Kernel Flags</key>

<string></string>

</dict>

</plist>

5 - Insert "mbasd=1" in between the <string></string>

after your typing it'll looks like = <string>mbasd=1</string>

Some people believe that mbasd stands for: mac book air super drive

6 - Save (press Ctrl-X)

7 - Answer yes to save by pressing Y

8 - press enter to confirm the file name.

9 - make a check now typing:

cat /Library/Preferences/SystemConfigurantion/com.apple.Boot.plist

You should be able to read "mbasd=1" where you have placed it.

10 - quit Terminal.

11 - restart your computer.

12 - Done! Plug in your MacBookAir SuperDrive. It should be smoothly running!

Yes You can, but don't have an to old Mac OS X

I tried the hack on a MacBook Core2Duo running with Mac OS X 10.6.8. Now the USB SuperDrive works successfully on my MacBook. On the same MacBook running under 10.5.8 it doesn't work.

It also runs on a MacBook C2D with 2,4GHz and IOS 10.9.5 Late 2008