Mount an Apple USB SuperDrive (A1379) in Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS with ease

Maybe it sounds strange to use a USB CD-DVD Drive nowadays. However, I have a collection of music CDs that I want to copy down to my Ubuntu notebook so I can reproduce them using Kodi. Kodi puts your smart TV to shame. Kodi plays almost every kind of media you can find and looks great while doing it! Checkout Kodi: https://kodi.tv/

First connect the SuperDrive. Then, install the sg3-utils with the following command:

sudo apt-get install sg3-utils

Lookup the device, it should be sr0 or sr1 by default depending on how many USB disc drives are currently attached. Check the output of following command to get a list off all device paths:

ls /dev

In my case, my Apple USB SuperDrive was assigned to sr1.

You will need to have a CD or DVD ready to test your device. Use this code to initialize the USB SuperDrive:

sg_raw /dev/sr1 EA 00 00 00 00 00 01

Now you should be able to introduce the CD/DVD to the USB SuperDrive.

However, this procedure has to be repeated after you boot the system again. To solve this, you can create a udev rule file to run this automatically. We’ll make use of the udev device manager. It runs as a deamon and receives events each time a device is initialised or removed.

Create the following file using nano:

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/90-mac-superdrive.rules

Copy the following code and save the file:

#
# Apple SuperDrive initialization rule
#
# See: https://gist.github.com/yookoala/818c1ff057e3d965980b7fd3bf8f77a6

ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1500", ATTRS{idVendor}=="05ac", DRIVERS=="usb", RUN+="/usr/bin/sg_raw %r/sr%n EA 00 00 00 00 00 01"