How To Use Macbook Air Superdrive DVD drive on Windows PCs

Introduction Compared to many How-To articles, this one is pretty simple, but it saved me from buying another USB DVD drive just for o...

Introduction

Compared to many How-To articles, this one is pretty simple, but it saved me from buying another USB DVD drive just for one little task.

The problem: I have both Macs and Windows PCs, and needed to install Microsoft Office from DVD media on an ultrabook laptop that had no internal optical drive.

Steps (1 total)

1

Download BootCamp from the Apple Support Site

The MacBook Air SuperDrive has unique firmware which prevents it from being properly recognized as a plug and play optical USB drive by Windows. Fortunately, Apple provides the drivers for running Windows on a Mac, as part of its BootCamp software.

If you download the latest release of BootCamp from Apple's support site, you will have a zip file wherein the path bootcamp\drivers\Apple contains the file "AppleODDInstaller64.exe".

Simply execute this file to install the Apple Optical Disk Driver for 64 bit Windows, and presto! You can then use the MacBook Air SuperDrive with your Windows PC.