Help, Panther eject key failure

[quiz3000]

I've just installed Os X Panther on my 1Ghz G4 and my keyboard's eject key stopped working, great.
It used to work fine but now there's nothing after pressing the key. This is extremely annoying as I cannot open the drive easily when it's empty, I wish I could meet that wiseass designer who left the eject key of the panel.

I found some discussions about keyboard related problems with Panther but nothing about eject key failure.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?

Thanks

[virividox]

have u tried repairing permissions or rebooting

[comrade]

If it's the actual key, don't forget you can drag the disc to the trash or control click and select eject. If it's just not ejecting then try what the guy who posted above me said. The key should work but in the mean time you might be able to get your disc out of the drive with the other methods.

[quiz3000]

I have no problems getting the discs out but whatabout opening the drive when it's empty? Control-click-eject doesn't work when there's nothing to click.
Rebooting doesn't help, permissions are in order and reinstalling the buggy pussycat didn't make any difference either.
So no can do but thanks anyways.

I heard that that there's a way to put an eject button on the menu bar and that installing USB Overdrive might help. I hope this works cos at the moment the only the only way I'm able to open the damn drive is to reboot the whole system while holding the mouse down or by pushing a paperclip into that tiny hole in front of the drive.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the volume keys are not working either.

And they call this Panther?

[mklos]

If you open your hard drive/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. Just scroll down a little and you will see Eject.menu. Just double click on that and it will add it to the menubar and that should eject the CD tray. If not, then try below...


Can you borrow someone's Apple Pro Keyboard just to see if its the keyboard? Maybe try re-installing Mac OS X. Maybe something didn't install correctly or you have a corrupt file somewhere. I know thats a PITA but that may be the solution.

[cpjakes]

I second mklos on this, Eject.menu is pretty sweet. I use it in sound studios where the CPU isn't in the same room. It's handy to know the status of the drive before leaving the room.

You can also hold down the mouse button on startup and it will open the optical drive.

cpjakes

[j33pd0g]

I would definitely try another keyboard if you can. Maybe try moving the keyboard to another USB port. Our keyboard in prepress is doing this... Swapped ours out with a working keyboard from the photo dept. Works great now... well, not for them!

[HexMonkey]

I had almost the same problem when I was using Jaguar. The eject key and sound keys wouldn't work. The only difference was that restarting would fix the problem, but they would quickly stop working again. I used the Eject.menu as a temporary measure.

I don't think the problem is keyboard related though, because when I installed Panther the problem went away. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but it obviously isn't Panther specific, and reinstalling might help.

[quiz3000]

I installed the latest update 10.3.2 and uninstalled the USB Overdrive from my system and everything seems to work again.
So, I suppose it was just a conflict between Panther and USB Overdrive. I haven't tried the very latest version of USB Overdrive yet cos no need for it at the moment but I assume that it will work cos it's an update build for Panther. Nice pussycat.

Thanks

[lazyboy922]

when i would burn a cd, it would disappear for the desktop and hardrive and wouldn't eject it. the eject menu thing just cleared that up! thanks!

[VladDracul]

Once one places an item in the menu bar by the method described above, how can one get rid of it?

[HexMonkey]

Originally posted by VladDracul
Once one places an item in the menu bar by the method described above, how can one get rid of it?

Command-click the menu and drag it off the menubar. You can also use this method to organise the order of these menubars.