My wife's Mini Mac - an Intel - has developed optical drive troubles I haven't been able figure out.

In a nutshell, it is very picky about what discs it chooses to recognize. Basically, it will read some commercial audio CD's and movie DVD's, and virtually nothing else.

When any other type of disc is inserted it will give the message "You have inserted a blank CD/DVD, would you like to.....". Sometimes it will simply spit the disc back out. Sometimes it will launch Disk Utilities before telling you that it is a blank disc.

For most movies, such as Finding Nemo on Disney's disc, it will play them.

Important note: For every disc that the Mini refuses to recognize/play, we put it into my Intel MacBook and it reads/plays them just fine.

Troubleshooting steps so far:

> Used an optical drive cleaning disc. The Mini, perversely, recognized it just fine and played the music on the disc during cleaning.

> Reset the PMU

> Reset the SMC

> Zapped the PRAM

The above steps have been taken from various forums and Apple troubleshooting articles and have had zero effect.

Suggestions?