Ok, here's a good 'won't eject the DVD" problem. Today I was watching a DVD and when it was over, no problem. I just hit the eject key and it came out. I put in another DVD movie and the thing started to read, then stopped, then started up again then stopped and on and on.. It just kept cycling. OK, I figured bad disc. So I hit the eject button. Nothing. I figured I'd open up Finder and click on the eject icon. Well, while in Finder, the CD drive didn't even show up. I had to manually hold the power switch to turn the computer off. Oh, this is an older (2008 or 09) Macbook 13". I turned the computer back on and it took a long time to finally boot, When I got to where I type in my password, the DVD drive started the cycling again. Spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down. Finally after riding the eject button like a cheap horse it finally ejected the DVD.
I believe another poster here has the same problem. OK, that said, I'm betting this DVD drive is failing. I'm going to try a cleaner disc and see what happens. I've had minimal luck with those things, though. Where can you get new drives for these Macbooks? Can I just use any external drive as opposed to replacing the internal or is there a particular one that is best for Mac's? I'm not as interested in burning discs as I am in playing CD's and DVD's and being able to load software. At this point, I am afraid to even put any discs in this drive. Oh, it did work with another DVD and with a music CD after this fiasco. The two discs I tried that did give me trouble have all played fine in my iMac 27 and two Marantz DVD players I have at home.