The perils of slot-loading optical drives
Today’s great joy is discovering that:
- a rental DVD got stuck in the drive on my laptop; and
- there’s no hardware “emergency” eject.
All optical ejections on the Dell XPS M1530 are done in software. Older Apple units used to have a pin-push hole so you could trigger an eject, but not this machine, nor it turns out after a bit of reading, current Apple machines.
The drive does not believe it has any media, and seems to be too smart for its own good: if it doesn’t think there’s anything in there, it ignores soft-ejects!
Getting the thing out of the drive would seem to require a service call. I’ve lodged a case, fortunately I’ve got the at-home support so with any luck they’ll arrange to have someone come out in the next few days to open the machine up and extract the disk.
Longer-term, I’ve ordered a 5.25″ USB2 enclosure and I’ll stick a spare tray-loading DVD-RW drive in that. Will use it with the iMac too, no point risking further irritation from this sort of crap.
Popularity: 45% [?]
All Apple slot loaders have an interesting feature in the OpenFirmware. If you hold down the mouse button as a computer boots, it will eject the contents of the cd-rom, whether the system believes there is something in there or not.
No idea if anything else understands that though …
Yup, I know about that. But it’s still a software-eject and I’d be happier with a last-resort mechanical option…