OSX Eject button on Keyboard

When putting a CD into my drive on my iMac I used to be able to press the eject button on my keyboard (top right) and the CD would come out. Now for some reason, it just isn't working.

Has anyone else had this problem and has managed to fix it, or has any ideas how to fix it?

Hold down the button.

OS 10.4.9 introduced this annoying feature for some reason.

wow - very annoying indeed. *** was the point in that?!

Thanks alot!!

Liam said:

*** was the point in that?!

Click to expand...

Teh Steve probably hits the eject button by accident all the time, to mute the Beatles when his iPhone rings. So Apple added a delay.

Alexis said:

Hold down the button.

OS 10.4.9 introduced this annoying feature for some reason.

Click to expand...

That's actually a feature?

I though it was just me being clumsy. What a dumb idea . . . can it be changed back to how it used to work?

jonnyd said:

. . . can it be changed back to how it used to work?

Click to expand...

I investigated to see whether it could be changed back, but all I did was create a mystery.

I ran an EasyFind search to see see if there was any toggle-type command to turn instant eject on and off.

Three of the files it hauled up are hdiejectd.plist, hdiejectd and Eject.menu. The rest are png files. I could open the plist with TextEdit, but that showed nothing except a "true" that presumably could be changed to "false." But changing it to false probably would nuke the eject key. So with TextEdit, I opened hdiejectd, then Eject.menu.

Neither showed anything obvious, so I closed them. But now I have a brand-new disk-eject icon in the menu bar. Clicking it opens and closes the disk tray whether there is a disk in it or not. But I haven't a clue as to why this icon appeared.



It resembles the icon that can be added to a Finder window bar, but that icon works only if there is a disk in the tray. I can move the menu-bar-eject icon if I hold down the Command key, so I could pull it onto the desktop to get rid of it, but I'd prefer to leave it.

I just don't know how it got there and how to put it back if I yank it.

Deepening the mystery, TextEdit won't open the two files anymore from EasyFind.

From Eject.menu in EasyFind, the only choice to open it is SystemUIServer (default). Nothing happens. If I choose Reveal in Finder, the choice is SystemUIServer (default) again. TextEdit says "File not supported."

Terminal and X11 are the only choices to open the other one, hdiejectd. I can open it with TextEdit if I choose "Reveal in Finder" and open it from there, and it shows almost-English in a few places. Terminal says "permission denied." I have X11 installed, but nothing happens when I choose it.

What am I missing that might be blatently obvious? Short of that, how did I put the icon up there? All Apple's Help says is:

Click the Eject icon in your menu bar, if there is one.

Click to expand...

The icon got in your menu bar from "Eject.menu". If you look, there are several unused menus in the same folder on your HDD all of which can be enabled by double clicking them. I stumbled across this a few years ago (in 10.3 IIRC) and have been using it ever since.

For heaven's sake! Thanks, baggss! I command-dragged the icon off the bar, double-clicked Eject.menu, and it reappeared.

baggss said:

The icon got in your menu bar from "Eject.menu". If you look, there are several unused menus in the same folder on your HDD all of which can be enabled by double clicking them. I stumbled across this a few years ago (in 10.3 IIRC) and have been using it ever since.

Click to expand...

Good one Baggss as always!

Good one Brown Study on the Easy Find. Works great!

I shall have a play with that later. But there's no way to get the keyboard to do as it used to (or did I misread that, and it does)?

I'm actually quite tempted to drill a big nasty hole in the front of my computer so I can poke the eject button on the DVD drive myself.

jonnyd said:

I'm actually quite tempted to drill a big nasty hole in the front of my computer so I can poke the eject button on the DVD drive myself.

Click to expand...

That wouldn't matter or work. Pushing the eject button on the drive will not pop a disc out if it is still mounted on the desktop. If you unmount the disc in OSX, it opens the drive, unless you do it through disc utility (unmount) in which case pushing the drive button WILL pop the disc out. It would only really be handy if the drive is empty and even then you wouldn't save much time, if any, over just holding down the eject button the keyboard for 5 seconds.

This one of those areas where you have to forget how the PC does it and just do it the Mac way.

It was better how it used to be though...

Alexis said:

It was better how it used to be though...

Click to expand...

Meaning how it was on the Windows PC? That's subjective, but OK. It was never that way on the Mac. Ever.

baggss said:

That wouldn't matter or work. Pushing the eject button on the drive will not pop a disc out if it is still mounted on the desktop. If you unmount the disc in OSX, it opens the drive, unless you do it through disc utility (unmount) in which case pushing the drive button WILL pop the disc out. It would only really be handy if the drive is empty and even then you wouldn't save much time, if any, over just holding down the eject button the keyboard for 5 seconds.

This one of those areas where you have to forget how the PC does it and just do it the Mac way.

Click to expand...

Well, I wasn't actually being serious, but it'd still be useful for those times when OSX 'loses' the disc. Save rebooting.

Liam said:

wow - very annoying indeed. *** was the point in that?!

Click to expand...

for people on laptops who were constantly hitting the eject button instead of the delete button and were getting annoyed by the noise it makes when trying to eject a non-existent disk

e.g. me

jonnyd said:

Well, I wasn't actually being serious, but it'd still be useful for those times when OSX 'loses' the disc. Save rebooting.

Click to expand...

Oh. I've discovered that in most of those cases disc utility can still find it and eject it.

baggss said:

Meaning how it was on the Windows PC? That's subjective, but OK. It was never that way on the Mac. Ever.

Click to expand...

it was new in 10.4.9 apparently. I didn't know that, but I knew the dvd was suddenly 'flaky'.

there should be an option. mine's not a laptop, i don't need it.

baggss said:

Oh. I've discovered that in most of those cases disc utility can still find it and eject it.

Click to expand...

nice.

jonnyd said:

it was new in 10.4.9 apparently. I didn't know that, but I knew the dvd was suddenly 'flaky'.

there should be an option. mine's not a laptop, i don't need it.

Click to expand...

I didn't know if he meant in 10.4 or on Windows. I agree about it being a pain though, but it's not that big of a deal imo.

baggss said:

I didn't know if he meant in 10.4 or on Windows. I agree about it being a pain though, but it's not that big of a deal imo.

Click to expand...

No, it's not life changing, and I can see it's a good thing for laptop users.

Just seems it would have been pretty simple to make it configurable. In terms of ergonomics, having to hold down the eject key is quite a big change. It goes from being a subconscious flick to a conscious interruption to whatever you're doing.