A friend of mine that is new to Macs couldn’t figure out how to get a CD to eject, after some frustration he then complained that his MacBook doesn’t have the paperclip hole to forcibly eject a disc from the superdrive. After some discussion I realized he’s probably not alone in his confusion of how eject a stuck disk on a Mac, so here’s a few different ways to do it, ranging from easy to more advanced. If a disk is still stuck in the drive after these methods have been exhausted, you may have an actual hardware problem.
How to Eject a Stuck Disk from a Mac
The first thing to do is try the four easy Mac disk eject methods described in the next few steps, each of these is intended to trigger the ejection mechanism of a superdrive / DVD drive on the Mac computer. You may not need to complete all four methods, or you may need to jump ahead to the advanced section below if you’re continuing to have troubles.
1) Press and hold the Eject key on your keyboard for 5-10 seconds, it looks like the above icon in this post. This should trigger the manual eject mechanism.
2) Next, right-click (control-click) on the disks icon on the Desktop and select “Eject” from the contextual menu
3) Drag the disks icon to the Trash bin within the Dock will eject disks as well.
4) Selecting the disk icon upon the desktop, then hit “Command-E” on the keyboard
The disk should eject with one of those steps, but if it doesn’t you can also try the methods described below. These are a bit more advanced, involving applications or the command line to manually trigger the ejection routine of the hardware.
Advanced Mac Stuck Disk Ejection Methods
Force Ejecting a Disk with Disk Utility
• Launch Disk Utility and select the CD/DVD from the sidebar. Click the Eject icon at the top of the Disk Utility screen, it should pop right out.
Forcibly Ejecting a Disc with the Command Line
• The command line can trigger the disk eject mechanism on Macs that are equipped with SuperDrives and DVD drives. This often works to forcibly push out a stuck CD or DVD from the drive.
To do this, launch the Terminal and type following command:
drutil eject
If the drive is working, you will hear the eject mechanism. Sometimes the stuck disk only partially ejects using this trick, so you’ll want to be ready to pull it out either with fingers or whatever else you feel like safely using.
Force Eject a Disc on Boot
Another trick is the force-eject on boot: This is done by restarting your Mac and holding down the mouse button (or trackpad button if you have a laptop) as the system boots. Hold it down until the system boots, again the disk should come out.
In the rare event that I have a stuck disk in my Mac I opt for the Terminal command mentioned above, it hasn’t failed me yet, though the ‘on boot’ method is also usually a guarantee to work assuming the drive itself isn’t broken.
Let us know what works for you in the comments below!
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