My asus sdrw-08d2s-u lite optical drive will not install on my mac

You would have to find modified or 3rd party firmware to flash to the drive to make it region free.

does the drive accept the disk then spit it out or does it never close the door?

Had the same problem on Mac.
Solution: You need to connect device to machine on Linux and give it "eject" command.
Do not to connect device to Windows machine. I was trying to burn cd on Mac. Then it was interrupted in the middle of burning (some files were missing). When I connected drive to Win it tryed to unsuccessfully read it and eventually explorer.exe crushed. And it will not resolve until you reboot the machine.

Check manufacturers Warranty, sounds like an internal issue. If expired, try to update the drivers for it. Otherwise, opening it up would be more of a pain than it is worth.
Best solution - get one of those DVD lens cleaning things, you might even be able to rent one from the library. A cd lens cleaner will do the same.

Sounds like driver problem to me... Try to use this tool: Driver Update Software for XP Vista 7 8. Wish you best of luck. Cheers

The best I can find is a slightly different part number 1 is SDR-08B1-S, 2 is SDRW-08D1S-U. The downloads are at Asus ;
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us
1 Select product-Optical storage
2 Select series-dvd-rom
3 Select model SDR-08B1-S

1 Select product Optical storage
2 Select series Slim DVD-RW
3 Select model SDRW-08D1S-U

Better You Run the Lens Cleaner Disk with Liquid Once. It may fix this type of problem most of the time. best of luck

What driver are you needing to install?

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Only Cyberlink Power DVD is compatible with Windows 7. Have you tried http://www.cyberlink.com/stat/window7-updates-center/enu/index.jsp ? You can check your compatibility with the suite you have and/or get updates.

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