Cannot open CD drive

Hello. The CD drive does not open on my Mac G5 (OSX 10.5.8). The only thing I can find that seems promising is an icon at the top of the hard disk window that looks like the eject button logos we see everywhere (a triangle with a bar underneath it). But when I click it or double-click it, nothing happens.

Trying to work around this, I plugged in an external CD into the USB port on my Mac. But the Mac does not recognize it (no disc icon appears on my desktop other than the one for the single hard drive in the Mac itself).

I seem to remember having this problem before, and the solution was a little program you can install to give yourself an icon to click on, up in the menu bar at the top (next to or near the sound icon). Probably that was on an earlier Mac OS, since I seem to remember the key F12 in this connection, and that only brings up the dashboard in this Mac.

Thanks for your help! ;P

I'm going to assume you are talking about a Powermac G5 desktop computer…since this is the only "G5" based computer with a CD drive that has a "tray".

You can open the CD tray in two ways (in addition to what you tried):

1. Press the keyboard button above the Delete key (key with the underlined-triangle on it).
2. When you reboot the computer…press and hold the mouse button.

HTH,

- Nick

Yep, that worked. Duh. Sorry. (Actually on my keyboard the key is above the '*' key on the far right but same difference.)

Also, I was wrong about it not being able to read from the external CD drive. I had put a DVD into that by mistake, and that CD drive could read only CDs, not DVDs. (I hadn't noticed when I burned the DVD that it was a DVD I was burning. Evidently the burning software inspects properties of the DVD-or-CD that you have put into the drive to determine which it is and goes from there.) Once I took care to burn a CD instead, that worked too.

Many thanks!

Peyton said:

Yep, that worked. Duh. Sorry. (Actually on my keyboard the key is above the '*' key on the far right but same difference.)

Click to expand...

Probably a different keyboard layout…Apple has a couple of them.

Great to hear it worked.

- Nick