Ejecting An Unrecognized Disc in Mac OS X
Mac users only:
Ugh! The Finder isn’t recognizing my CD or DVD at all, and the “eject” button and functions are all greyed out. Do I have to pop this puppy open to get my disc? Even rebooting doesn’t work.
Nope. Check this out. At the command line, run the “disktool” command with the “-l” flag to list what discs the system *really* sees:
$ disktool -l
***Disk Appeared (’disk1′,Mountpoint = ”, fsType = ”, volName = ”)
***Disk Appeared (’disk1s1′,Mountpoint = ”, fsType = ”, volName = ”)
***Disk Appeared (’disk1s1s1′,Mountpoint = ”, fsType = ”, volName = ”)
***Disk Appeared (’disk1s1s2′,Mountpoint = ‘/Volumes/Untitled CD’, fsType = ‘hfs’, volName = ‘Untitled CD’)
***Disk Appeared (’disk0′,Mountpoint = ”, fsType = ”, volName = ”)
***Disk Appeared (’disk0s1′,Mountpoint = ”, fsType = ”, volName = ”)
***Disk Appeared (’disk0s3′,Mountpoint = ‘/’, fsType = ‘hfs’, volName = ‘Macintosh HD’)
Ah! There’s my “Untitled CD”. Appears the systems knows it as “disk1s1s2″ for whatever reason. So now we eject it with “-e” flag:
$ disktool -e disk1s1s2
disk1s1s2 device will attempt to be ejected …
***Notifications Complete for type 1
***Responding yes to unmount - disk1s1s2
***Disk Unmounted(’disk1s1s2′)
***Disk Unmounted(’disk1′)
***Notifications Complete for type 4
***Responding yes to eject - disk1
***Responding yes to eject - disk1s1
***Responding yes to eject - disk1s1s1
***Responding yes to eject - disk1s1s2
***Disk Ejected(’disk1′)
***Disk Ejected(’disk1s1s2′)
It ejects!
No idea why my Finder freaked out and lost sight of the disc, but I am sure am glad to have found this helpful tip. Keep it in your “just in case” files!
on March 6th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
On the ol’ Mac Plus, there was a little hole you could stick a paperclip or toothpick in to manually eject the disk.
Surprised they didn’t keep that little function.
on March 9th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
I thought if you just pressed and held the eject button for hours it would eventually pop out?
on March 9th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
There was also something else that I couldn’t remember but just looked up again:
You can eject a disc from the drive by restarting the computer and holding down the trackpad button while the computer starts up. Press the trackpad button until the drive ejects the disc.