[X4U] Re: Stuck CD - advice much appreciated

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 11/30/06 at 11:03 PM, eleventhvolume <colin at eleventhvolume.com>
transmitted the following electronic message:

>Dear List,
>
>I have a CD that is stuck inside my MacBook Pro. The eject mechanism
>attempts to eject the CD, but appears to encounter a problem, gives up
>and remounts the disc on the desktop and iTunes. From the sound of it,
>it's a hardware rather than a software problem. I can't see any
>obstruction, but there's not much to see anyway. The disc appeared
>perfectly fine when I inserted it and plays fine via iTunes. Can
>anybody recommend anything to get it out? Advice would be much
>appreciated as I use the drive a lot.
>
>All the best, Colin.
>
>The CD is a review disc by an electronica group called Gescom. It's a
>CD reissue of the world's first minidisc-only release, now that
>minidisc has become an almost defunct medium. Perhaps there's some
>form of revenge, and certainly irony, in this situation.

The first thing to try is to use Disk Utility, Toast, or some similar
utility that has an Eject command (this probably won't work if the Eject
key doesn't do the job, but...)

Assuming that fails, I would suggest shutting down, letting the machine
cool down for 30 minutes to an hour, and then restarting with the
trackpad/mouse button down. You might need to have your fingers ready to
grip whatever manages to protrude so that it doesn't get sucked back in
(such as when the disk has a label that is catching on the opening).

This is just one of the reasons I despise slot-loading drives.

-- 
Dennis R. Cohen