I was surprised at the number of responses to last week’s article on ejecting stuck disks, and thought this week would be a good time to talk about disk ejecting in more detail.
Many of you suggested various utilities for ejecting disks. While each of these utilities is fine in itself, it’s important to realize that they all act in the same way behind their graphical user interfaces (GUIs). A disk may fail to eject in one of several ways:
Mechanical failure of the actual drive: In this situation, the drive’s eject mechanism has failed, and no software utility or firmware trick will get the disk out. It’s time to find your closest authorized service provider.
Damage to the disk slot: When the slot itself is damaged—either compressed shut, damaged from a fall, or similar events, you can often pry the slot open. While a wide flathead screwdriver is an effective tool, it will mar your computer; a hard, non-smudging plastic tool is best. In our service facilities, we use a “black stick,” our technical term for a black nylon probe with a flat end and a pointy end. It’s the best tool for manipulating small components inside a computer in addition to being an excellent drive slot opener.
Software preventing the disk from ejecting: In this scenario, the disk will not eject because the computer is actively using it. This would happen if, for example, you were listening to a CD in iTunes and try to eject the disk (wait, do people still listen to actual CDs?). A better example would be trying to eject while importing music into iTunes from a CD. Because the computer is using the disk, it cannot eject it. In Snow Leopard, Apple took the very friendly step of notifying the user which application is preventing the disk from ejecting; before, it was up to the user to figure it out.
I remember a repair for a customer that spilled a little water on the upper right corner of his keyboard, and fried the actual eject key but nothing else. To save her the expense of lost productivity of doing a full repair, I simply added an eject icon to her menu bar. You can do the same—an explore all the menu bar “extras” available to you—by navigating to /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. To enable one, simply double-click one of the items here, and to remove one from the menu bar, simply command-click on it and drag it out of the menu bar.