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Ok, how the HELL do you eject a cd from a Mac

jimtron said:
Ron didn't say there was no button on the physical drive, AFAIK.

I have a Mac Pro, which has an eject button on the front of the optical drive. Also, AFAIK, all Macs with slot-loading optical drives have physical eject buttons on the keyboards.
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That's still an electronic solution. If they don't have a mechanical button for a mechanical device, it is horrendous design.

It's bad design because it's arrogant design. It banks on the software always working. Ain't so.
 
jimtron said:
When you say "it's" what are you referring to? The OP didn't mention the model, did it? Whether it was an old or new Mac, a Mac Pro or iMac?

My Mac Pro is in the current line, and has a door that can be pulled back revealing an optical drive with an eject button and paper clip hole. See the top bay in the photo currently at this page:

http://www.apple.com/macpro/
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Oops :o. Must be the fact that the Mac Pro is way out of my price league, so I never paid much attention to its details.

The "it's" I used is the drive/slot in my MacBook, my boss's MacBook Pro, and all the iMacs I have seen in the Apple store. Yes, no physical/mechanical eject button that's accessible without opening the case. It's one of the few things I was worried about before I got the MacBook. So far, it has worked surprisingly well.
 
CFLarsen said:
That's still an electronic solution. If they don't have a mechanical button for a mechanical device, it is horrendous design.

It's bad design because it's arrogant design. It banks on the software always working. Ain't so.
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However, the CD-drives in PC's can be blocked too from opening! The software can instruct the drive to ignore a push on the "open" button.

You may not see this behaviour with Windows, but you can see it with Linux. Linux - as every UNIX - requires that a disk (or partition) be mounted before the filesystem on it can be used; and likewise, that it be unmounted before you remove the disk from your system.

(If you want to see a reason for this, try it with a floppy. Copy a 1MB file to the floppy. That happens instantaneous, you won't hear the floppy - all writes are still in the kernel cache. Then when you issue the unmount command, you'll hear actually write the file to floppy.)

So, when you put in a CD and mount it under Linux, the Linux kernel will issue a command to the drive that it must disable the "open" button. All CD-drives, except for the very early IDE drives, do this. You can simply check this by having a file from the CD in use and then push the button. It won't open.

So that "software can be faulty" argument doesn't hold. And on a Mac - with MacOS, another flavour of UNIX as OS - the same reasoning as for Linux applies - the software would logically need to disable the button while the CD is in use. So why have a button at all?
 
CFLarsen said:
That's still an electronic solution. If they don't have a mechanical button for a mechanical device, it is horrendous design.

It's bad design because it's arrogant design. It banks on the software always working. Ain't so.
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Note: An electronic solution is not always a software solution. It could be pure circuitry. As long as there's power in the battery, it could work, whether the CPU and hard drive work or not.
 
As far as physical buttons are concerned, a non-slot-loading drive will have a paperclip button. This is a purely physical mechanism, and is sane. Anything that doesn't have this mechanism will end in trouble if a fault develops, and the only way around it would be to remove and disassemble the drive.
On a PC, this can take 10 minutes - on a mac, this can take longer than the remaining time in the universe before heat death. Trust me.

Macs are pretty, and generally good machines, but if you had the choice between pretty and useable...

I've used macs and pcs for a long time and still have to google for what seemingly random combination of keys does things on a mac, since they're not listed in the little booklet you get and macs don't give useful error messages. Try turning it off and on, then mashing all the keys at once. Might work.
 
For those of you with slot-loading Macs--how often do you have problems ejecting discs? AFAIK it's not a significant issue. For some people, it's a higher priority to have an aesthetically pleasing computer on their desk. I don't know if it would be possible or practical to have an optical drive with eject button and paper clip hole in an iMac or Mac Mini. If you're more the pragmatic type, PCs are probably the way to go. I don't think Macs are better or worse than PCs--it's a matter of taste, in my view. But I don't buy the argument that slot-loading optical drives are an example of "horrendous design." Some people would rather have an aluminum iMac on their desk, and would consider the average PC tower to be aesthetically horrendous. It comes down to one's taste and priorities.
 
jimtron said:
...... Or if it's really stuck, stick a straightened paper clip in the small hole at the front of the drive.
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Tried that on a PC that had a live CD in the drive that would not shut down. All I got was nasty grinding noises. Pulled the plug out of the wall to restore harmony. The PC was OK after that. Just goes to show that panic is not always the wrong answer.
 
AgeGap said:
Tried that on a PC that had a live CD in the drive that would not shut down. All I got was nasty grinding noises. Pulled the plug out of the wall to restore harmony. The PC was OK after that. Just goes to show that panic is not always the wrong answer.
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Exactly. I'm not sure if slot-loading optical drives are more likely to cause problems (CD getting stuck or whatever) than the alternative (optical drives with eject buttons and paper clip holes). But if anyone has evidence to the contrary, let us know.
 
MAC. Cause it's not better than Windows, you have to use Itunes, and it's everything about software operations. Physical buttons? Bah! Long live the Hype.
 
By the way, most if not all new Macs have physical eject buttons on the keyboards. And again, is there any evidence that slot-loading Macs have more stuck-CD problems than non-slot-loading computers? Are we certain that it's a significant problem not having an eject button on the actual drive itself?

MAC. Cause it's not better than Windows, you have to use Itunes, and it's everything about software operations. Physical buttons? Bah! Long live the Hype.
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If you prefer Vista, go for it. You have to use iTunes for what?
 
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To the OP, try in this order:
  1. Hold down F12 for between 4 and 10 seconds.
  2. Boot up while holding down the mouse button.
  3. Restart into Open Firmware by holding command-option-O-F, then enter eject-cd.
  4. Uses Terminal, type drutil tray eject
  5. If you have more than one optical (or removable) drive, then open Terminal, type drutil list to list your removable drives. Figure out which number is the CD drive giving you trouble, then type drutil tray eject n, with n being the number of the drive.

If none of those work, you can try the old paperclip trick if your drive has one of those tiny pinholes, otherwise you need to take it to the APL store.


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elgarak said:
To all the "Get a PC" morons: There are PCs out there with a slot-loading optical drive...
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Yes, but even those drives have a hardware eject button. It's not the operating system being run, it's the lack of a hardware override.

ETA:
jimtron said:
By the way, most if not all new Macs have physical eject buttons on the keyboards.
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My G4 iBook has that, and it's the F12 key (hence my mention).
 
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Grenme:

See posts #7 and #16.

I noticed a few arguments from ignorance on this thread:

#12
None of the current lines of Macs has any of the things you mentioned. It's a pure slot-loading drive.
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Wrong, as I pointed out, there are current Macs with non-slot-loading optical drives. Not to mention that the OP didn't mention if his Mac was current or not, or whether it was slot-loading or not.


#19
What, no button on the physical drive?

That is truly bad design. Appalling.
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This was in response to the OP. How do you know it doesn't have a button on the physical drive? AFAIK, Ron didn't mention which Mac he has--it might be slot-loading, or it might not be. Also, if the icon didn't show up on the desktop, if he did have an eject button on the front of the optical drive, that wouldn't necessarily eject it. That button doesn't work 100% of the time, on Macs or non-Macs.

#21
That's still an electronic solution. If they don't have a mechanical button for a mechanical device, it is horrendous design.

It's bad design because it's arrogant design. It banks on the software always working. Ain't so.
Click to expand...
This may or may not be an argument from ignorance. Do we know for sure that computers without eject buttons on the front of the optical drive are less likely to cause problems (such as can't eject disc) than slot-loading (ie, iMacs) computers? I'm not necessarily buying that slot-loading computers cause more disc problems than otherwise, but I'm open to good evidence.

#22
Yes, no physical/mechanical eject button that's accessible without opening the case. It's one of the few things I was worried about before I got the MacBook. So far, it has worked surprisingly well.
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Just pointing out that not having a "mechanical" eject button is working surprisingly well for at least one person. Also, the above quote is about Macbooks. Do PC laptops have a mechanical button for ejecting optical discs (sincere, not rhetorical question)?

#32
MAC. Cause it's not better than Windows, you have to use Itunes, and it's everything about software operations. Physical buttons? Bah! Long live the Hype.
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I asked in an earlier post and am still waiting to hear what "you have to use iTunes" means. You don't have to use iTunes to play MP3s--so I'm not sure what this means. But I'll wait to find out. Also, as far as "physical buttons," most Macs have physical buttons to eject optical discs. They're on the keyboard, as well as on the front of the optical drive if you have a Mac Pro or older Mac.
 
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Ron_Tomkins said:
I don't actually have that button on the screen.

But I do have it on my keyboard as I recently discovered thanks to the collaborations of the fellow posters.


I am new to Mac, as you shall understand.
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Slot-loading, or tray drive (ie, does a tray pop out when you eject the drive, or is there just a slot you insert the disc into)?
 
jimtron said:
For those of you with slot-loading Macs--how often do you have problems ejecting discs? AFAIK it's not a significant issue.
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I had mine for 5 years. I encountered the problem twice in that time, and one of those times it turns out I had put the disk in upside down.

(Whether that actually caused the problem or not, I don't know. I don't see why it should, but I thought I'd mention it.)
 
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