How to Share CD/DVD Drives with Any Mac Running OSX 10.5 or Newer

  

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With the growing popularity of the MacBook Air, optical drives seem to be slowly disappearing. 

Apple’s “Remote Disc” feature, built into OSX, will allow any Mac with an optical drive to share it over a network so a MacBook Air can access it. Now, what if you don’t have a MacBook Air? Or maybe your optical drive is broken. Here is a simple way to share a CD or DVD on any Mac:

First, on the Mac with the optical drive you want to share, go to “System Preferences” and click on the “Sharing” icon. Make sure CD/DVD Sharing is selected.

Second, on the Mac that doesn’t have an optical drive (or a broken drive), open up Terminal and write these two commands:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

Then reboot the computer. This turns the shared optical drive into a shared folder on your network. To go back to default settings, open up Terminal and write the same two commands replacing the word “true” with “false”.

If that doesn't work, contact us and we'll walk you through it. 

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