Advice about my macs cd drive ??

hi all, basically i have had my mac for about a year and a half and im haveing problems with the drive. if i put a disc in it will read the disc fine but when i go to eject the disc it sounds like its going to eject but then starts to read the disc again and i cant actually get my disc out, i was just wondering if anybody knew what the problem is, how it can be fixed or where i can get it fixed and how much it will cost. many thaks

HI and welcome....
Restart your iMac while holding down the Eject key. If that doesn't help, restart while holding down your Mouse.
If that doesn't help, if the disc mounts on the Desktop, drag it to the Trash.
Or, launch Disk Utility. if the disc shows up in the panel on the left, select it then from the Disk Utiity menu click File / Eject.
If none of the above has helped, restart the computer holding down the Option key. When the startup disk selection screen appears, let go of the option key and press the keyboard's eject button.
If you need to take the iMac in for service, it's hard to say what they may charge.
Carolyn

Similar Messages

  • Advice about an external DVD drive

    Hi there,
    Pardon the basic questions, a computer genius I am not.
    I have a rather elderly iMac G4 running 10.4.11 and it has never been able to even see DVDs. I am facing necessary software upgrades which come in a DVD format. Is an external DVD drive what I get? Will my poor iMac see a DVD coming from an external drive? I have always found it annoying that I have the DVD player software but I can't use it.
    Note: if a solution contains advice about replacing my hard drive, please know that particular drama happened this summer when the original hard drive died. After much angst, my iMac is working well; I just need to be able to load software in a DVD format.
    thank you!
    suzy

    Yes an external DVD optical drive will work. The cost needs to be considered, is it worth it.
    You could opt to go the cheapest way possible; search Ebay on the PC side(since a high % are not as overall savvy as Mac users) look for the older Sony CDR burners, these were blue external enclosures which housed CDR burners. You can purchase modern DVDR player/burners cheaply now a days and install the optical drive into one of those Sony enclosures. The reason I suggest Sony is way back when they were expensive but well made and work to this day all the way to Leopard. You should be able to pick one up for $25.00 plus a good optical drive for less than $50.00
    BTW "necessary software upgrades" if you don't mind what are the upgrades and why only on DVD media? There are other ways to skin this cat.

  • Advice about buying a new hard drive

    I have a TOSHIBA Satellite L25-S1216. I have not been able to boot into Windows XP for 3 years using the factory Recovery and Applications/Drivers DVD and the Fully Recover procedure on the back of the DVD packae. I have been using Linux for the past 3 years. Ubuntu SMART test disk utility tells me I have 20 bad hard drive sectors. I have concluded I should buy a new hard drive, since mine has 20 bad sectors. My current hard drive is ATA-6, so I know I need a PATA compatible hard drive. I'd like to increase to maybe 60 GB from the current 40 GB. I'd also like to go with a solid state drive, but there don't appear to be many PATA compatible solid state drives.
    And I don't want to get too complicated or expensive; I want to stay with my current Windows XP. Not sure if a SATA PATA interface adapter would work to allow me to use a SATA solid state hard drive or not. I know (from reading knowledge base posts) there is also the potential problem of the older BIOSs not recognizing the newer Advanced Drive Format drives.
    QUESTION: Does anybody have any advice about buying a hard drive that would work for me? How can I be reasonably sure a hard drive I buy is compatible with my computer?
    Thank you,
    Bob
    Solved!
    Go to Solution.

    either get a pata drive (you can get larger than the stock 40gb) or use your $ towards a more current new/used laptop.  pata ssd would be a waste and I doubt adapter would work.  also, ms is dropping support for xp so it would be a good time to upgrade to something with a more current os as well.
    L305-S5955, T9300 Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD, Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit

  • When looking at my "About This Mac" it says that I have 60gb of space left on my hard drive, but when I go into finder to find all of these files there is not 300gb worth in anything I search, even searching, "All files on the Mac". Help!?

    When looking at my "About This Mac" it says that I have 60gb of space left on my hard drive, but when I go into finder to find all of these files there is not 300gb worth in anything I search, even searching, "All files on the Mac". Help!?
    It says I have over 150 gigs of video on my hard drive. But I have gone through and deleted almost all of what shows up, still it says there is roughly the same amount on the hard drive. Where are these files? I want to delete them so I can have my hard drive clear.
    Thanks for your help guys!

    Quote from the article.
    Time Machine in OS X Lion includes a new feature called "local snapshots" that keeps copies of files you create, modify or delete on your internal disk. Local snapshots compliment regular Time Machine backups (that are stored on your external disk or Time Capsule) giving you a "safety net" for times when you might be away from your external backup disk or Time Capsule and accidentally delete a file.
    So what makes a notebook any different then a desktop, other then with a desktop you might have your tm backup drive connected all the time.
    The object here is to not indiscriminately delete files you need or want to keep. I personally have never deleted a file I wanted to keep.
    In essence a backup is for catastrophic failure of your system. So it can be restored once that failure has been fixed. Not because you go in willy nilly and start deleting files.

  • HT201250 My backup external hard drive hasn't work since I insalled Snow Leopard. Bad:(  I am still learning about my MAC and would just like to re-format the hard dive and set everything up again. I want to upgrade to Lion but can't untill I backup what

    My backup external hard drive hasn't work since I insalled Snow Leopard. Bad:(  I am still learning about my MAC and would just like to re-format the hard dive and set everything up again. I want to upgrade to Lion but can't untill I backup what I.

    Read through the links here, calm down and take your time.
    https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

  • I want to use a video projector with powerpoint can I use my mac to drive it- and what about sound?

    I want to use a video projector with powerpoint can I use my mac to drive it- and what about sound?

    Hi Scott,
    You should be able to. If the projector has a speaker with acceptable sound, that's one option, otherwise powered speakers or a surround system.
    What connections does the projector have?
    Exactly which MBP do you have?

  • I recently used SuperDuper! to transfer my hard drive, setting etc to an SSD to replace in my MBP.  When I placed the SSD in and went to "About This Mac" I came upon this in the Storage section.  My question is where can I find my Backups and delete them?

    I recently used SuperDuper! to transfer my old MBP hard drive and its settings to a new SSD.  Everything went smoothly.  When I opened the "About this Mac" section and looked under Storage it showed this:
    Where are the "Backups" (purple) located? I want to delete these files to free up disk space on my new SSD.  Thanks in advance for all of your guys help!

    These are the "Local Snapshots" Time Machine makes when the actual Time Machine harddisk is not connected/avaiable.
    OS X Lion: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs
    Mac OS X 10.7 Help: About local snapshots
    Stefan

  • Advice about external hard drive recovery

    Does anyone have experience or advice about external hard drive recovery?
    I have a USB external drive that crashed during a power brownout, I couldn't mount the image at first but used Diskwarrior to rebuild it. Now I can see and navigate the drive but I am unable to pull many files off without the finder crashing. It would transfer about 130mb of 10gb then stay at that number and not progress past that amount.
    Should I try a different recovery program or would removing the drive and placing it in another external drive enclosure solve something like this?
    any help appreciated

    When in DW there is a Preview to see the old and new volume.
    http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/harddrives/topic4557.html#d10aug2010
    Data Rescue 3 demo will show you what it's scan finds, costs $99
    http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
    you need to have another drive to recover your files to.
    Yes I would try another case, maybe the power brick was all that is now half-dead also
    And you really need a UPS - never be w/o
    http://pondini.org/OSX/UPS.html
    MacBook Pro:
    https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro

  • Advice about creating a website(s) with a .Mac Account - Newbie

    Hello,
    I need some advice about creating a website with a .Mac Account.
    The Situation
    For my media course we need to create a short film, then brand it, and distribute it along with press releases and press packs. No other group have thought about setting up a website - where it has all the company details, info about the Cast, Crew, Film, and maybe a link to the finished product.
    The Problem.
    I'm the only one who has an Apple Laptop. We don't want to use the computer at the university as A LOT of students use them and every month or so they're given a clean install.
    I've designed my own 'virtual series' website to showcase my screen writing work, but I haven't uploaded it. I was waiting until I finish university in the summer before I activated my 1 year .Mac Account. I have a .Mac Account, which has still got to be activated.
    How do i go about creating my 'video production' site, if I've already got my own created and sitting in iWeb?
    How could I just 'launch/upload' my 'video production' site without putting my own up as well?
    Should we buy a separate .Mac Account?
    Oh, and what would the address be, so that we can put them on business cards.
    THANKS for any and all help.

    Lots of questions... you've come to the right place!
    Here are some links that might be helpful to you:
    http://web.mac.com/varkgirl/iWeb/iWebFAQ
    http://web.mac.com/mark8heaton/iWeb/DomainSeparation/SiteSeparation.html

  • What should I see in Storage Info about this mac if i have fusion drive

    I have a 21" Customized Fusion Drive Imac. The start up times have been slow ( over a minute each time ) and I am starting to doubt I have Fusion installed.  My sister has a standard new 21" Imac and her system report reads identical to mine.
    Should Fusion show up as anything different in the Storage section when you click 'about this mac'? 
    My storage shows identical to my sister who does not have Fusion Drive.  We both have a 1TB Sata disk icon.

    I also have 21.5"
    it looks like this ( I think ) :

  • About My Mac is telling me that I'm using more space than I think I am

    Hi there,
    I've only had problems with storage once before, so I bought DaisyDisk and used it - it cleared out a lot of space and I loved it - this was months ago by the way. Then, I checked my storage today and suddenly my 'Apps' tab was taking up about 130GB of data. I knew that my 'Apps' area was only taking up about 10GB so I got spotlight to check my drive again so that I could find out what was actually taking up all of this space. After this, I checked About My Mac again and the 'Other' tab was suddenly taking up loads of room. I opened up DaisyDisk and deleted some old files and managed to get from about 40GB of free space to about 90GB. I'm happy with this so far but I want to know what is in that 'Other' tab. DaisyDisk isn't helping me as it says that my user is taking up about 90GB of space but when I look on Finder it says that it isn't as big as that. I really want help so that I can clear out all the unnecessary junk off of my Mac before I go back to school. Also, I know that I have 20GB of files in my user (shows when I copy everything from the All My Files section in to a new folder), so I don't think this 'Other' section should be as big as it is.
    I have a 2013 13" Macbook Pro with Retina Display with a 256GB Hard Drive.
    A picture of the About My Mac section:
    http://i.imgur.com/Xl6wE0o.png
    Thanks for any help.

    For information about the Other category in the Storage display, see this support article. If the Storage display seems to be inaccurate, try rebuilding the Spotlight index.
    Empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. If you use iPhoto, empty its internal Trash first:
              iPhoto ▹ Empty Trash
    Do the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature. Then restart the computer. That will temporarily free up some space.
    According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation—not the mythical 10%, 15%, or any other percentage. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of the data. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space.
    When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as  Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself. If you followed bad advice to disable local snapshots by running a shell command, you may have ended up with a lot of data in the Other category. Ask for instructions in that case.
    See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space.
    You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) or GrandPerspective (GP) to explore the volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can also delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one. Note that ODS only works with OS X 10.8 or later. If you're running an older OS version, use GP.
    Deleting files inside an iPhoto or Aperture library will corrupt the library. Any changes to a photo library must be made from within the application that created it. The same goes for Mail files.
    Proceed further only if the problem isn't solved by the above steps.
    ODS or GP can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.
    Back up all data now.
    If you have more than one user account, make sure you're logged in as an administrator. The administrator account is the one that was created automatically when you first set up the computer.
    Install the app you downloaded in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
    Triple-click anywhere in the corresponding line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C:
    sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
    sudo /Applications/GrandPerspective.app/Contents/MacOS/GrandPerspective
    Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
    ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
    ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
    ☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
    Paste into the Terminal window by pressing command-V. You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. Type carefully and then press return. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator. Ignore any other messages that appear in the Terminal window.
    The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders, sorted by size. It may take a few minutes for the app to finish scanning.
    I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.
    When you're done with the app, quit it and also quit Terminal.

  • Need advice about transfering files

    Hello. I just got a new mac through an education deal at school. I hate this process of transferring files from one computer to the next but have never done it from one Mac to another before so thought it would be pretty smooth. Im new to the whole Migration Assistant and so need some advice about what to do next.
    I tried using migration assistance upon first turning on my new mac but was using wireless and it just wasnt working. My computer kept saying my new mac wasnt responding and I kept having to select ok or cancel every minute and with 15 hours to go, i thought f^*# it. So I decided to just start the computer up and manually transfer files. Then I found an ethernet cable, turned file sharing on and am using my public folder to transfer but its turning into The Most Tedious task and things arent transferring properly (like certain folders arent copying contents, just the folder itself).
    Now Im wishing I could have used migration assistant from the start but what can you do. I cant just re-install the mac os software and try again because before we got our new macs they installed some programs for us, like Logic, and I dont really wanna mess with that.
    Whats my best option at this stage? Ive transferred about a gig of pictures and documents over so far (and I think my old hard drive is about 60 gig full) but theres a bunch of other little things like iphoto, imovie, garageband, stickies, as well as big folders of music (and itunes - playlists etc) that I wanna make sure get copied in entirety. Will migration assistant handle that? Is it best to delete the stuff Ive transferred so far and let it start fresh? What would you do?
    Sorry my post is so long
    Message was edited by: girrrl

    Also, now that I have an ethernet cable, if I go ahead and use migration assistant to transfer the account from my old computer, will Logic only be available through the new account I have set up on my new computer? Would I have to log out of one account and into the other and back and forth to access the different files/programs? Any help would be much appreciated

  • Advice needed on Mac Air or Pro?

    As my faithful HP laptop of 9 years is now on it’s last legs, after reading so many positive reviews about the Macs, I am considering purchasing one of these.
    I would really appreciate some advice on some concerns/reservations I have:
    My first dilemma is which is more appropriate, I personally  like the look of the air because it is smaller & I was reading that the SSD is better than what is on the Pro (sorry I am not very technical! ).
    My use:
    Mainly internet browsing
    Itunes
    I don’t do any gaming
    Photo editing (hobby not professional)
    Small amount of work in word & excel (minimal)
    To give you idea of my current usage I looked on my current PC settings and my usage on my C drive is 99.3gb of a 148gb.  Most my photos I have backed up on an external hard drive, but would like to have them back on my laptop.
    Questions:
    Would I be able to use this external hard drive on a Mac? (it’s a Cirago)
    Would I be able to open Excel & Word documents on a Mac?
    I currently use Opera for my internet which I really like, would I be able to download this on a Mac?
    Sorry if some of these questions seem a little dumb, but I am a complete novice & know nothing about the Macs!
    Any advice would be very much appreciated!

    Either the MacBook Air or Pro would suit your needs. The MBA's greatest assets are its extreme portability and SSD while the MBP's greatest assets are its internal DVD and expandability. I have both (one is mine and one supplied by work) and given a choice of just one I'd  choose the MBA. i seldom need a DVD drive.
    OGELTHORPE's advice to go for the 256GB drive (even though it might seem that you don't need it) is spot on. A very large percentage of customers who buy the 64 & 128gb models come back to the store where I work part time within 6-18 months with full drives.
    Mac Office 2011 is very similar and will take care of your Office needs - LibreOffice is an open source product (and free) which will open and let you edit your documents. And assuming your drive uses USB (and I'd assume it does) you'll be able to use it with your new Mac. There are two common Windows disk formats - the Mac can read both but can only write to FAT. You may or may not want/need to reformat it.

  • It's in, it's FAST!,  and I can't  find it in "About This Mac"...

    Greetings all,
    I just got my SATA card and HD installed and now I have a question. I've been scrouning around in about this mac but can't find the drive info. Anybody have any ideas? It's there and it works but no info. For all I know this is typical but I'd appreciate any advice anyone has.
    Cheers,
    Chris
    G4 466 Digital Audio 1.5 gB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.6)   Pioneer DVR-111DBK, FirmTek SeriTek 1V4, Hitachi 500GB SATA II HD

    look under scsi devices under the profiler.
    Some SATA controllers use the same chipset as their scsi counter parts.
    That is where my Acard SATA controller shows up.

  • Storage values under about this mac displaying incorrectly, but amount of space used IS correct. Any ideas?

    I noticed recently that the "storage" under "about this mac" is displaying incorrectly. It doesn't show the correct values for my photos, videos, and audio files. It classifies this data under "other". I have been searching all over the internet, I went to the Apple genius bar yesterday and they recommended I re-install OSX. I did and it still shows up incorrectly. They were baffled, said they never really came across this issue. I have tried re-indexing spotlight, that didn't seem to help.
    The amount of storage used IS correct. It just doesn't show up under the correct categories in storage, under about this mac. Also, the computer seems to work fine. No real issues. It's a mid 2012 MBP. 500gb hard drive. Most recent OSX is installed.
    I DO NOT think it is local snapshots, cause my backups category is small and the amount of space used and free is correct. I have downloaded omnidisk sweeper to confirm this.
    I have seen a few posts on here and around the web referring to this, but no real answers. I have also reviewed Pondini's info on this to no avail.
    Does anyone have any ideas?!?!

    Also,
    I had installed a version of parallels with windows 7, but deleted it. Would parallels be causing my computer to index incorrectly? I I used appcleaner to delete all the parallels files so I do not have it anymore.

Maybe you are looking for