Optical drive has difficult time ejecting

My DVD drive has a hard time ejecting certain dvd's. Not all but only certain ones, and they do not have a paper label. Is this a sign my drive may be heading for trouble? Has anyone else had this problem?
Thanks for any help.
Marco

I just saw Lyssa's post just above. I know what to do.
Thank you.
Marco

Similar Messages

Help! My optical drive has gone nuts!

I ejected a CD this morning and since then the optical drive has been making eject noises every 30 seconds or so, even though there's nothing in the slot. I tried rebooting the computer but that did nothing. I also tried restarting it and pressing on the trackpad to see if there was another CD stuck in it but nothing came out. Can someone please help?

You may need to take into an Apple Store

Optical Drive Has Failed - Can I disable it, what's next?

My 2 year old Mac Mini's optical drive has failed.
I had finished importing a CD and went to eject it and all I heard was grinding and the CD would not come out. I tired everything under the sun to get the disk to eject with nothing working, so I took it to my local Apple Care Center.
Their diagnosis is the optical drive has failed. So now what?
1. They removed the CD, but my Optical Drive is still grinding and it is driving me crazy (the grinding is not continuous, but happens every 8 seconds to 10 seconds)! What can I do, can I somehow disable the Optical Drive so it won't continue grinding? I have reboot several times and nothing seems to satisfy/stop this grinding Optical Drive!
2. I guess I am going to have to buy an external Optical Drive (oh joy, more cash), can anyone tell me about life w/o an internal Optical Drive and using an external optical drive? Any suggestions on which model/features I should look for? ...besides one that uses FireWire, which is a must for me.
3. I have an external hard drive which I use to backup my Mac Mini. Now that I don't have an internal Optical Drive, are there any other safety issues I should be thinking about? How about booting the Mac Mini from a disk when it crashes without an internal Optical Drive?
I am totally frustrated at this point!
Cheers, Paul

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
With no disk in the optical drive, it should be almost entirely inactive (it would be expected to make some noise initially at bootup, but should not be active after that). It makes me wonder if the disk was removed correctly, or whether the drive is still 'latched' and thus 'thinks' a disk is in place. In this situation, I'd return the unit to the Apple Store and ask them to resolve the problem, since a failed drive should not create these symptoms.
For external drives, there are a number of good solutions - see http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/optical-drives/ for some examples, starting at around $72. There should be no issue with using an external, and indeed, you are likely to find that even the cheapest of those listed provide you with rather faster performance with rather less fussiness about media brands. You are right to want a FW drive, for best performance.
As long as the external optical is connected and powered, and a valid MacOS install disk inserted, there should be no problems booting to it if required - though you may have to hold the Option key down (Alt if you are using a PC keyboard) to get to the boot loader screen, rather than C to boot directly to the optical drive.

MacBook optical drive has started making noises at wake and restart

This MacBook is about 5 months old and the optical drive has just started making noises at wake from sleep, or at restart. There is no disc loaded in the drive, but the noise is as though a disc has been inserted in the drive and it is attempting to read it. This goes on for about 5 to 10 seconds, then stops.
The optical drive seems to work fine, reads CDs and DVDs no problem. This isn't a glaring issue, I'm just trying to determine if it is the precursor to a mechanical problem, or is possibly some sort of software glitch. Thanks for help if this rings a bell with anyone.

I posted this to a different thread earlier today. I will add that most of the experience I've had with this issue is in Tiger or Leopard. I don't think I've seen it yet with Snow Leopard. My instincts tell me it is more of a hardware issue than a software/OS issue. (Just my $0.02.)
I have seen this many times. (I support 100+ Mac Laptops, most are 13" MacBooks.)
Just to clarify, MacBook optical drives do normally make some quiet noises when waking from sleep.
When there is a CD or DVD in the drive, there are some soft sounds, and then you hear the disc spin up. When there is not a disc in the drive you hear a different sound. I assume it is relating to checking for a disc in the drive. To me, it sounds exactly the same as the quiet sounds you hear right before the "Good Chime" when you power up.
BUT, sometimes MacBooks make a much louder noise, that is similar the sound you hear when you insert or eject a CD or DVD, only sort of "doubled". Usually you hear it when waking from sleep, but I have also experienced it happen intermittently when the MacBook is turned on, under normal use, or not being used (but not sleeping or waking from sleep).
In the past, I have sometime cured it with a reset of the SMC and PRAM. This has not always worked. I have also seen it disappear after inserting a disc into the drive. Most of the time, the sound has returned some time later. I have called Apple on this issue several times, and sent the MacBook in for repair. My memory is that they have replaced the optical drive under AppleCare.
I will add that I have recently seen this Knowledge Base Article (below), with instructions for "resetting" the optical drive on a MacBook Pro, but it did work for me on a MacBook 13". Insert a disc halfway, take it back out, then put it in all the way.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2839
Past experience tells me not to be surprised if the noise resurfaces. My advice is call Apple if you have AppleCare, or if the MacBook is under one year old.
Good Luck.

HT3964 Hi folks, I own am IMac 27" running OS X 10.8.2. The optical drive has stopped working in that it accepts the disc but spits the CD, DVD even my original iMac install DVD back out, after attempting to read the disc. Any of you kind folks any ideas?

Hi folks, I own am IMac 27" running OS X 10.8.2. The optical drive has stopped working in that it accepts the disc but spits the CD, DVD even my original iMac install DVD back out, after attempting to read the disc. Any of you kind folks any ideas?

Have you tried one of those CD cleaning Discs yet?
Have you done a PRAM reset, CMD+Option+p+r...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
In fact, do 3 in a row, takes a bit of time.

Optical Drive has stopped working since upgrading to ATI 9800

Due to hardware failure of my ATI Radeon 9600 I decided to upgrade to the 9800, which requires (in G5's) a four pin split power supply to be connected to the optical drive.
I have turned my computer on and successfully receive signal out to my monitors, but thus discovered I can't eject the disk tray!
I opened up the computer again and all the connection seem fine.....
Is anyone familiar with installing the 9800?
G5 (duel 2.0 Ghz) Mac OS X (10.4.9) 1GB RAM

Thanks for both your responses.
I am going to restore the system with the other video card and try to get things back to normal, but I did a few more troubleshoots.
The optical drive seems to be functioning. I started up my computer with the side panel opened and I moved the drive a few inches out in order to press the manual eject button. I was able to open the drive bay and close it by pressing the eject button on my keyboard. (That is the first time the keyboard worked.)
I closed the drive bay with an installer CD in it but the CD wouldn't read. I restarted holding the C key down to try and boot off the CD drive- nothing. So I guess the drive isn't working....but yet it seems to be powered????
Do you think this is really only a bad cable? When installing the new Video Card I had a very hard time detaching the 4 pin power supply from the optical drive. Could I have damaged something?
It wouldn't surprise me if now my optical drive was broken. I have had to replace everything on my computer since it reached three years old.
G5 Mac OS X (10.4.9) 1GB RAM

Pushing optical drive tray to close / eject key

silly question -- is it a bad habit to push the optical drive tray inward to close it rather than hitting the eject key on the keyboard? for some reason half the time i press the eject key on my keyboard it does nothing .. it's a hassle so i always push the tray in to close it. is it meant to respond to this?

I've had a similar problem but only when Parallels is running. While Parallels is running I can open the CD tray with the keyboard button but it won't close. I have to close it by hand in those situations. I've resorted to pausing Parallels just to close the CD tray lately!

Optical drive not working only ejecting DVDs

Hi guys, I have a Macbook Unibody model no MacBook5,1. The thing is a month back the optical drive stopped working. I insert a DVD, its tries to read it for about 15 seconds and ejects it. Now the funny thing is last night i tried playing Dexter on it (great show) and it worked!!! but today i tried playing the same DVD and it does the 15sec eject thing. Now i'm in China, apple care expired about a month ago and i'm looking for a way to fix this with my hands. Any help would be great! Thanks

Buy an external drive.

No boot up because optical drive has media in it

I recently purchased Snow Leopard to upgrade my early Intel MacBook Pro. When I put the disk in the disk didn't mount so I attempted to get it to eject. I wasn't able to get it to eject so I followed some of the trouble shooting. I'm thinking my optical drive isn't working properly because I haven't used it in a while but now when I try to boot the computer it hangs when it try's to read the optical drive. I tried forcing it to eject using the mouse button as well as trying to force a hard drive boot by holding the "d" key. At this point is there anything I can do short of opening it up and pulling out the disk myself?

Holding down the 'd' key at startup is the shortcut to start Apple Hardware Test. To select a boot volume at startup, hold down option.
However, if holding down the mouse button at startup won't cause the disk to eject, there may be a hardware issue with the optical drive. One thing to try before writing it off entirely, though, is to boot into single-user mode by holding down command-s at startup, then enter the following command:
drutil eject
To restart in single-user mode, use the following command:
reboot

HT4818 Why can't you create a Windows USB on a computer with an optical drive because my optical drive has failed

I get my USB and my Windows 7.iso but when I open bootcamp the option to create a Windows USB is not clickable. Please help because my Optical Drive doesn't work.

Hi Rosera,
This is bad and I am sorry to hear that you are running into these issues.
Let me connect with you, so right now, the current state is that you have installed copy of PSE 8 in trial on your windows 7 machine, and when you are trying to enter the serial number from your PSE 8 Box, it is saying the serial number to be invalid?
It might sound pretty obvious, but please make sure that you are entering the serial number correctly and of PSE 8(in case you bought a PEPE box)?
Have you tried the steps mentioned below by Barbara?
If possible, you can send me the serial number through PRIVATE MESSAGE and I can check it on my end that whether the serial number is indeed invalid or that the issue is with your machine?
Regards,
Ankush

Optical Drive Difficult to Remove

Product Name HP Pavilion DV5000
Product Number EP411UA#ABA
Model Number DV5020US
I need to replace the optical drive. I've consulted HP video and relevant service manuals and the topic is covered quite satisfactorily with one exception.
The exception is the drive is hard, very hard if not impossible to budge from the laptop. The video implies it will slide out once the retaining screw is removed. Wiggling the case does nothing to loosen it. I'm not to crazy about prying against a PCB at the bottom of the well. Not impressed with levering against a plastic screw hole. A cold chisel and hammer would be counter productive in my way of thinking.
I am performing a clean install of XP Home. The system does not operate the drive even though bios clearly sees it. DOS boot utilities fail to startup.
So any helpful suggestions in getting the optical drive out?"

Try ejecting the tray and pull on the tray fully extended. The drive is junk anyway so no need to be squeamish.

Optical drive ejects disks when I put them in

I tried inserting a disk into the optical drive and it would eject it right after.

Since my machine was only 2 days old the genius bar let me exchange my mac for a new one after seeing the problem in action, he even tried the DVD in 3 other macs at the counter, 2 could read it and one could not. the problem was thought to be with a dual-layer DVD but he grabbed some other DVDs and it was able to read it, so whatever the difference between the 64-bit and the 32-bit DVDs of windows 7 is, that is what the problem is isolated to in my case. I got my new machine home and it still cannot read the disk. Same problem as before, it reads the disk and promptly ejects it, I think the firmware needs to be upgraded because it does this in windows, during a boot, or within snow leopard. Please let me know what else I can try before I take this machine back.

It looks like my MBP optical drive is dead - arg!

I have a Macbook Pro - circa 2006. This one does not have apple care.
I've got a blank cdr stuck inside it. As near as I can tell the macbook
does not even know it has a cd/dvd drive anymore. The drive is spinning,
but the OS does not see a disk. Nothing in disk utility. Holding down
mouse button or eject key does nothing. Trying drutil seems to do nothing.
Choosing about this mac tells me there no Disc Burning device was found.
Arg.
I don't burn things on this machine often, so it is not critical, but is nice to have. The geniuses I run into seem to know less than the people here. I guess I should give them a try, but I'm already afraid of what they'll estimate for repair.
I'm thinking just buy an external cd/dvd drive/burner would be a good option for this machine. Any specific suggestions? Anything more I should try before I throw money at it?
The other issue is, I hate wasting battery spinning a disk the machine cannot seem to see. Do I have to open the machine up (or pay somebody to do it) to turn
off the defective internal drive?
Is there a reasonably priced internal (or external) drive that would be recognised by the system should I have to reload or update the OS at some point?
Thanks for your help.

It may be something of a long shot, but you might check to see that DVD player is still in your applications folder. Also, you could try verifying both permissions and the disk, and repair if necessary. I don't know if that will help, but it won't hurt anything. It may even be worth trying to reinstall the OS, just in case it has somehow gotten corrupted and is not recognizing the optical drive. It might be worth booting from your install disc and navigate to Disk Utility and see if you can see the optical drive then.
It's also possible that one of the cables to the optical drive has come undone and needs to be reseated.
On the other hand, I have been reading about optical drive problems on this forum for some time, and some people thing the internal optical drive is just not of the best possible quality. So investing in a good external optical drive may not be a bad strategy.
Good luck!

Mac Pro with Lion 10.3 'forgets' its optical drives

I've got a really weird problem here, and I think that I can discount a hardware fault since this problem manifests on two Mac Pros (a 2009 Octo-core and a 2009 Quad-core). When I start either of these machines up with Snow Leopard, theres no problem - however, if I boot up using Lion 10.7.3 then both machines suddenly develop a strange problem with their optical drives (both are kitted out with a Blu-Ray writer in addition to the standard Superdrive).
After either machine has been turned on for a period of time (about 30 minutes), they 'forget' that they have optical drives fitted. Up to that point, everything works fine. After that point, problems occur. When the problem manifests, disk utility hangs when launching. Shutting down the computer entirely, waiting a moment, and then restarting fixes the problem. Merely selecting restart results in the 'No Entry' ( / ) and a failed boot. The problem isn't unique to disk utility - it applies to any program which attempts to access the optical drive. Finder, the eject Menulet, Handbrake, anything. Forcing quit and then restarting is no good either - once an app attempts to access the drive that app cannot be used again after a shutdown and restart, although all other apps running keep running fine.
I have investigated this problem by resetting PRAM, resetting SMU, and ensuring that the latest firmware patches have been applied. None of these worked. I then reinstalled Lion from scratch (erasing the disks first, and clean installing from Lion on a USB stick). Still no luck.
The common factor with both machines is the hard disk (the octo has Snow Leopard, the quad has Lion) - as part of my diagnostics, I swapped the start disks over. In fact, both machines will run fine with both hard drives installed - as long as the boot disk is Snow Leopard.
Is this a known fault with 10.7.3? Has anyone else experienced this? Or is it, as I suspect, a duff hard disk? Mind you, if it is a duff hard disk, how come it doesn't cause problem except when it's used as a boot disk?

These sorts of problems are often caused by peripherals that do not tolerate [√] put the hard drives to sleep when possible, or Deep Sleep.
They can be solved by not sleeping, and there are also some very complex ways to disable deep sleep that you can search for is you want to bad enough.

Optical Drive keeps checking for a disk every 5mins

MBP 15" - My optical drive keeps spinning up as if is checking for or reading a disk. There is not one in there. It doesn't seem to be causing any problems, it's just annoying.

dseibold wrote:
MBP 15" - My optical drive keeps spinning up as if is checking for or reading a disk. There is not one in there. It doesn't seem to be causing any problems, it's just annoying.
I was going to begin my own thread about this but I'm glad you've begun one already.
I'm having the same issue as you are and it's quite annoying. It's not only annoying but it makes me worry about the longevity of the motor in the optical drive.
A bit of history -- after my LCD backlight died on my original 2.0GHz MacBook Pro and after 3 repair attempts (all gloriously FAILED) by the Apple Store on Regent Street here in London (flagship store my eye!) it was decided that rather than attempt more repairs Apple would replace the machine. As Apple would only guarantee they'd meet the specs of my previous machine I was given a stock 2.4GHz unibody MBP. I received that machine 4 days ago, Thursday of last week. Out of the box it was exhibiting the phantom disc issues you describe, roughly every 5 minutes. The only time it wasn't making the noise was when I had a disc in the drive.
Assuming it to be a defective optical drive I booked a Genius appointment and the earliest I could get was earlier today. I took the old machine in and between the issue I described with the new machine and the recent repair debacle they decided to swap the new computer for another new one on the spot (which was good as I would have asked for that to happen had they not brought it up). For interest's sake, that first unibody machine also had 2 dead pixels.
Fast forward to when I get back to the flat and unpack the second replacement unit today only to find that after I restore from my Time Machine backup the optical drive is doing the SAME THING again. The new unit also has 3 dead pixels. I will be taking this machine straight back to Apple tomorrow to ask *** is going on and get some satisfaction.
One thing I did find, after some investigation, is that when the optical drive does its phantom ejection, there's a process started. If you watch Activity Monitor (sort by process ID, newest first) you'll see DiskManagementTool kick in when the noise is made. That's a component of Disk Utility however thus far I've not discovered what triggers it or why; however, I wonder if it's anything to do with some component that was on my original MBP that was archived via Time Machine migrated to the new unit. Because I've neither done a clean OS reinstall nor waited past the migration assistant to restore my data, I'm not sure if the drive makes the noise when my backup's not in use but I have this nasty feeling it wouldn't.
Anyone else having this issue, please launch Activity Monitor and keep an eye on it to see if the same process kicks in when the optical drive makes its noise. I suspect others will see that happen, meaning that's the first step in figuring out a solution. It really seems like it's a software issue so it should be fixable.

Optical drive has difficult time ejecting

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