Last week, I was helping a patron to read a CD. When he tried himself, both PC and Mac didn't recognize the CD. We tried a PC again and it worked fine this time, but he wanted to see if it could work on a Mac because that's what he had at home.
That's where the trouble began.
After inserting the CD and waiting 5 mins, the Mac didn't recognize it. So we tried to eject it. Emphasis on "tried". The CD was stuck regardless of how hard and fast I pressed the eject button. Since the computer didn't recognize it, the option to click on eject in the File tab was unavailable. We could hear it trying to push the CD out when we hit the button on the keyboard but for some reason it couldn't. Searching on Google, we tried various solutions.
Things that didn't work:
- Restarting the computer while holding down the eject button
- Restarting the computer while holding down the eject button and the option button
- Opening up iTunes to hit eject (CD wasn't recognized so option was faded out as well)
- Petting the back of the Mac and begging it to eject it
What did work, thankfully, was using terminal on the Mac. Terminal is the equivalent to the command prompt on a PC where you type in commands manually without using the graphical interface. After opening terminal, I typed in this command "drutil tray eject", the computer responded well and tried pushing it out longer than the other times. So I repeatedly hit the up then enter button to repeat the command. Slowly but surely the Mac was pushing the CD out a little more each time. Finally it pushed it out enough I could use my fingers to pull it out.
If there are any other options or solutions people have found, please let me know! I'm more of a PC person and any more info on Macs would be appreciated.
Thanks for posting your experience Marshilla! These iMacs show their age sometimes, as we have had the disk drive issue in the past. Do you remember which Mac you were working on with the disc drive error? I'd like to check it out and see if it was a temporary issue or if we need to block off the disc drive on that computer.
ReplyDelete