Remove a stuck CD or DVD from a slot loading drive

If a CD or DVD is physically stuck inside your MacBook's or MacBook Pro's slot-in drive (e.g. when you've inserted a CD with a paper label) this tip might be useful:When pressing the eject button the disc is moved a tiny bit and pulled back inside immediately afterwards. You can probably see only a very tiny bit if it, but that part can?t be caught by regular tweezers or other tools available in a typical household. I also unsuccessfully tried some tips for removing a stuck DVD floating around the web.Instead, try to use the shutter of an old 3.5" floppy disc, and bend both ends of the shutter slightly outwards, so that the disc can easily slip between the ends. Now you have ...

published on Thursday, the 5. June 2008, macosxhints

Eject all locally mounted disks via AppleScript

If you're like me, you tend to install several updates and/or software packages at once. When through, I like to eject all my mounted disk images with a simple AppleScript: tell application "Finder"to eject (every disk whose ejectable is true and local volume is true and physical size < 1.0E+9) Technically, this doesn't look for mounted DMGs but rather for ejectable, local (ie, non-network) disks with a size less than about 1GB. For most purposes, this will do the job. Copy and paste the above into Script Editor and save the resulting script in ~/Library/Scripts, then access it from the Scripts menu. Alternatively, add it to your tool bar, side bar, or assign it a hot key (with a third party hot key program), etc. [robg adds: As this script only checks for size and ejectable status, it may have unintended results depending on your system configuration. When I ran it, it ejected one (but not both) of my mounted CDs, but didn't eject the T...

published on Friday, the 30. May 2008, macosxhints

Ditching the Disc: Car Stereo Makers Ejecting CDs for iPod-Only Units

First eight-track players slid off into history. Then that unruly stack of cassette tapes disappeared from glove compartments. Now, car-stereo makers are marketing units that threaten to boot compact discs into the auto audio graveyard. Last Wednesday, Blaupunkt announced it's shipping a second-generation, $160 stereo and AM/FM radio that ditches the CD player in favor of ports for other digital music technologies.

published on Wednesday, the 30. April 2008, macnewsworld

UK music group pushes for media player tax

The British government should tax the sale of media players, a body of the UK music industry is advocating. The Music Business Group is said to have rejected a recent government proposal, which would see people legally able to transfer music from CDs to media players for free; while the practice is widespread and taken for granted by the public an...

published on Wednesday, the 16. April 2008, macintosh-news-network

Apps: Media Catalog, DiscLabel

Media Catalog 3.8.3 ($25) Indexes your removable media, such as Backup CDs and DVDs that you can quickly and easily find your files. In the 3.8.3 version of Media Catalog the most outstanding new feature is the option to automatically catalog and eject volumes, making it ideal for a setup on a headless Xserve. The improved quicksearch now behaves m...

published on Thursday, the 21. February 2008, macintosh-news-network

10.5: Prevent users from ejecting CDs with dscl

Sometimes in may become necessary to restrict access to local resources to certain users on a given workstation. In the past, NetInfo was the easiest way of accomplishing that finite control. Now with 10.5, that tool is no longer available, but has been replaced with the ever-popular dscl.Recently I acquired a 10.5 machine for my two kids, and it became necessary to lock their access to the CD-ROM (since they broke the one on the 10.3 machine). Using some of the information I've gathered in the past from this site, I managed to put together the necessary command line arguments to lock that access. Read on for my solution. Here's what I did:Output the mcx_settings to a text file saved to the root directory:dscl . -read /Users/kids mcx_settings > /mcx_settings.txtOpened this text file and found the entry for com.appl...

published on Wednesday, the 16. January 2008, macosxhints

Rip enhanced CDs with help from Disk Utility

I recently tried to rip an "enhanced" CD (Andrea Bocelli - Sentimento) in iTunes, but it didn't see the CD since it mounted as a data CD and wanted to show me the content through a controlled player. However, I discovered that I could go into Disk Utility and mount just the Audio CD part of the CD, and iTunes saw it instantly and could rip it ... Insert CD Open Disk Utility Select the greyed-out "Audio CD" line item within your CD drive Click Mount in the Disk Utility toolbar That's it; now you can burn away. Select your CD drive and click Eject to finish. If you're doing multiple disks, you probably need to quit Disk Utility each time.

published on Wednesday, the 2. January 2008, macosxhints

Force the system to find a 'lost' optical drive

I had the very unpleasant experience of a DVD drive seemingly dead with a DVD inside: I inserted a DVD in the drive, but it didn't mount and I couldn't eject it. I restarted the Mac while pressing the mouse button down (both the track pad and then a USB mouse). Nothing. I restarted again and pressed Command-O-F followed by eject cd. Nothing. More worrying: System Information wouldn't see the DVD drive at all. I restarted several times with no more luck. It looked like it was the end of the DVD drive, right?Wrong. I just had to put the Mac to sleep by closing the lid of the laptop. When I woke it up, the drive woke up as well, the DVD appeared, and I was able to eject it. I thought this hint, albeit totally straightforward, would be useful because I was very close to running to the nearest Mac support store. I would never have believed that putting the Mac to sleep could be the solution! I'd be interested in any rational explanation of this behavior. ...

published on Tuesday, the 7. August 2007, macosxhints

One solution to jammed discs in laptop Macs

I've noticed that certain CD and DVDs never jam in my MacBook Pro, while others almost always wind up jammed. It also seemed that culprit discs would only jam if left in for more than a few minutes. My conclusion? Lower quality CDs and DVDs must warp slightly when heated, which causes them to jam in the player. My solution: Turn off the MacBook Pro, and put it in a cool location for about five minutes. Then eject the CD as soon as the OS starts up. This has worked every time for me. [robg adds: I've probably only ever had a few discs stuck in any of the Mac portables I've owned over the years, so I'm posting this as not only a hint but also a call for comments: are jammed discs somewhat common, and I've just been lucky to miss out on this problem? Or is this possibly a sign of a misaligned drive or other hardware related issue? Please share if you have additional information...]

published on Thursday, the 2. August 2007, macosxhints

Use a Windows Upgrade disc for Boot Camp installs

I use Windows PCs to check if my cross platform software, created on a Mac, works properly on Windows. Over the years, I have found myself upgrading OSes on the Windows side, and so I only have upgrade CDs for most versions of Windows. Thus, when it came time to install Windows XP Pro into BootCamp on my MacBook, it got to the point where it wanted to see "an original qualifing disc." But of course, there was no way to eject the disc I was installing from. On a whim, I tried the following...I restarted, but first hooked up an external drive, and put the old qualifying disc in it. Yep, sure enough ... the system found the original disc in the external, and skipped the step demanding that I eject and insert same. The Windows XP installation then went fine from that point.

published on Tuesday, the 19. June 2007, macosxhints