cd eject from a broken iBook

iBook not booting OS

so my iBook has been on the fritz lately. Two weeks ago it stopped working and I sent it back to Apple for them to fix it.

Now again it seems that it's back to not working again.

It gets to the boot screen when it has the grey apple logo and the working gear spinning beneath it and stays there indefinately.

I tried removing my RAM and airport extreme card, like the Apple support site said to, but nothing has changed.

I am thinking seriously of sending it back to them.... again... only that one of my favorite CD's is stuck in the CDROM and I can get it out since OS won't load.

I know there must be some kind of command key combination to get it out, but I don't know what it is.

also, if anyone has any ideas as to what is actually wrong with my laptop, I'm all ears.

As soon as you turn on the computer hold down the mouse click on the iBook and it should eject...If not you can during startup, press and hold the Command-Option-O-F key combination to enter Open Firmware, type "eject cd" in lower case letters, then press return.

sweet, got it.

Now, in firmware, is there anyway to diagnose what might be wrong, or should I leave that for the technicians at the repair center?

Try booting from your OS X cd (hold down c with the disk in as you turn the computer)
and try to do a disk repair and see if it says anything

running disk repair, seeing a lot of red popping up in the window. It says Invalid directory item count and such. Then at the bottom it says "Repair attempted on 2 volumes" then "1 HFS volume repaired" in green and "1 volume could not be repaired" in red...

I of course am sitting here going "...okay..."

and we're still not booting OS

Hmm do you have two partitions on the drive?

neg,

I don't partition drives... I never saw the functionality of it.

That is strange because it should have only had to repair 1 volume

Would formating the drive help?

I don't have time before I have to go to work, but the thought crossed my mind.

You could do that. It could help but if not it leads me to think the problem is with the hard drive

Well... it worked.

formatted and here I am, making my post from a very empty iBook. I have no idea what was wrong with it, but for now at least, it's fixed.