Ejecting a Stuck CD or DVD from Mac Mini

November 1st, 2007 at 8:46 pm (Mac OS X)

If the disc is stuck in the drive but not mounted (i.e. doesn’t show up in the finder), and everything else has failed (eject button, F12, Cmd-E etc), and you want to eject the disk without having to reboot - for all you “uptime” junkies :-) - then try this in a terminal window:

drutil tray eject

and hit return. If that doesn’t work, try:

drutil list

This lists all removable drives you have connected.
Then type:

drutil tray eject n

where “n” is the number of the drive to be ejected.

Thanks to MacFixIt.com for this

5 Comments

  1. toubabou said,

    December 10, 2007 at 11:37 am

    I would also think that you could open Disk Utility and eject the disk from there. Disk Utility is aware of loaded devices that are not mounted.

  2. wickedlush said,

    December 10, 2007 at 8:21 pm

    Unfortunately, Disk Utility didn’t work for me in this instance - which is why I was happy to find a lower-level way of doing it. Worth trying though - thanks for the comment

  3. william said,

    January 20, 2008 at 1:42 am

    yeah my wife stuck a dvd cleaner disc into our mac mini, it would not mount, it kept trying to force it out but due to the “little brushes” on the cleaning disk, it was jammed.
    i googled some advice and turning the mini upside down and, re-booting, and for good measure holding the mouse button Worked!

  4. Super Dave Osbourne said,

    January 25, 2008 at 4:42 pm

    Have MacMini 1.83 core 2 duo. OS X 10.4.10 with VMWare installed. Have GNUstep Live 1.0 CD and booting. No problem until I force quit during a reinstall of GNUstep attempt while trying to save time between reboots of the VM. Now CD is stuck in drive, and both the above drutil tray eject and drutil tray eject 1 do not work. Disk util does not see the device, or the CD media in said device. Time to reboot (shame on apple) to eject a CD. I thought times had advanced to the point where software was tested and the OS wouldn’t get confused like this… I guess not.

  5. MrMaDSeN said,

    April 13, 2008 at 10:31 pm

    DVD of mine is stuck in a mac mini core duo 1.83. Nothing of the above seems to help. Drive spins up and down constantly and freezes when I try to use disk utility. It can see the drive but I can not get to point on the EJECT button.

    I am really stuck here…. whats my options.. Return it to the Apple store?

Post a Comment