I’m helping my Dad out with installing some software on his MacBook Air but since he didn’t spend the money to buy the additional external CDROM drive, I’m kind of stuck. Is there some sneaky way to read CDROM or DVD disks on the Air even though there’s no drive actually hooked up?
Dave’s Answer:
On first glance my answer would be “no” because if there’s no drive hooked up, there’s no way to read a disk on the computer, right? Wrong.
What I remembered after a bit was that when you’ve more than one Apple Mac connected via a local network, you see each drive on the remote system not just the system itself. Stands to reason, actually.
In this situation, though, it’s going to be a good thing: what you need to do is connect your Dad’s MacBook Air up to another Apple Mac that does have an optical (CD/DVD) drive and use that remotely.
Let me show you how it works…
First off, my favorite way to connect to another Mac on the network is to use the Command-K shortcut. When I press those keys, here’s what I see:
The “Time Tunnel” is my network backup device, and the G5 Desktop is the device I want to share, a desktop computer in my office.
When I connect to it – entering the proper password, of course – I can see each of my drives (X and X2), my home directory and the CDROM I’ve inserted into the desktop optical drive, “Monopoly”:
Sweet! Double click on the CDROM name and:
It’s just like browsing the disk directly. When I’m ready, I’ll do what it suggests and drag the specified folder directly from the remote optical drive to my local Applications directory:
It’ll copy…
and after a minute or two, success!
Software installed exactly as it would have been if I’d have had an optical drive directly on my own MacBook Air (though perhaps just a wee bit more slowly).
