Can't eject DVD when drive does not recognise it.

[charliegriffin]

When a DVD disc, e.g a movie, is faulty or for some reason my Macbook DVD drive doesn't recognise the disc, I need to know a quick way of "force" -ejecting the DVD.

It takes forever. It tries to read the disc far too many times. I've tried all methods of ejecting. Noe work, because the drive tells me there is no disc!!

Eventually after about 5 minutes, a window pops up saying "You have inserted a blank DVD" and I'm given the opportunity of ejecting.

Apart from that option, the only other thing that works is to restart. Not satisfactory. Is there another way, r a manual means of ejecting?

 

[bobtomay]

... I've tried all methods of ejecting. None work...
Is there another way...

Since you have tried "all" methods, then surely there is not "another" method.

Unless you like to read posts suggesting the methods you have already tried, you may want to tell the members what all methods you tried.

(Slot load drives are a pita and hence my not being too upset about losing the built in slot load drives in favor of an external tray loading drive.)

 

[charliegriffin]

DVD drive

Hi bobtomay

Yes you're right! Silly me….What I meant is that I had tried all the methods I could think of, i.e. the eject button, COMMAND - E, the eject button in the DVD player application.

The only thing that works is various methods of rebooting, which I am hoping can be avoided, in favour of a quicker, simpler method.

Some free-standing DVD players have a pinhole to manually force the disk drive to eject.

My Mac DOES eventually offer the chance to eject, saying, "You have inserted a blank disk", and it does eject, but not before multiple failed attempts to recognise the disc or the data. It just takes too long (5 - 10 minutes).

I have since tried some of the following:

1. Press the Eject button on your keyboard -

OR

2. Click on the Eject button in the menu bar

OR

3. Press COMMAND-E

OR

4. Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder

At the prompt enter or paste the following:
 /usr/bin/drutil eject


Restart the computer by entering reboot at the prompt



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OR

5. Restart the computer

After the chime press and hold down the left mouse button

OR

6. Boot the computer into Single-user Mode. At the prompt enter the same command as used above in 4.

OR

7. Reboot the computer holding the option key down

Wait for the boot drive options to appear

Press the eject key on the keyboard


When it's ejected, select your boot drive and click the arrow key to boot up


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Restarting or rebooting does work, but I am hoping to avoid rebooting every time I have this problem.

Charlie

 

[bobtomay]

I don't think I ever tried all the ones you have.

I had very few discs I ever inserted that presented the problem while I was using an internal slot load. Consequently, I just rebooted and never did look for an easier way. Don't think I've read of one either. Plus, about 99% of what I do with optical discs is still done on my Windows desktop machines rather than my Mac notebooks. We've got quite a few folks that are primarily on their Macs and hopefully you'll get some others to chime in.