My friend just purchased a mobile broadband modem. So she asked me to try it out. Took the CD, popped into my drive and nothing happens. No pretty CD icon on my desktop, so I tried to eject it. No response….I tried and tried and tried. Nothing happened.

So I looked up online to find the possible solutions. Some said restart with touch pad key pressed, some said boot into open firmware, some suggested using cardboard to “assist” the CD to eject, some said use Itunes, some said press Alt + Apple + Eject, some said tilt the laptop to leverage on gravity, some said use another CD to mobilise the CD inside hoping it would purge. Tried all that, nothing worked. No sight and no sound of activity.

I opened up Toast and it shows my CD drive name, I knew that my optical drive is still alive and intact.

So I have decided to resort to remove the casing to physically remove the CD from the CD drive. As I looked up the guide on opening the casing, something struck me - boot from CD! That usually spits out the CD if it doesn’t boot (as I experienced that many times the last I tried to install Darwin).

So did just that - restart with the C key held down. Walla! drive started whirring and pressed eject and it spat!