How to open the cd tray without the apple keyboard?

[nospleen]

I recently talked one of my friends into switching. He hates the keyboard, so he is going to get a new one. How can he eject the cd drive without the Apple keyboard? I know how if there is a disc already in the drive, but what if he wants to open it and put a cd in? Here I was thinking I knew alot about macs and I get stumped by a dumb question like this. :p

[stoid]

I think that most 3rd party keyboards can have F12 or something like that configured to open the CD tray.

[HexMonkey]

Go to /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/ and open Eject.menu. This will put a menu in the menu bar that allows you to open and close the CD drive.

[nospleen]

You guys/gals rock. Thanks for your help!

[jsw]

Go to /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/ and open Eject.menu. This will put a menu in the menu bar that allows you to open and close the CD drive.

Ummm... feeling a bit like an idiot now, but... how do you get it out of the menu bar?

[ravenvii]

Macs really ought to have manual optical drive eject. What if your computer went to hell and you can't boot into OS X, but you have a CD/DVD stuck in there?

[stoid]

Ummm... feeling a bit like an idiot now, but... how do you get it out of the menu bar?

Apple-click. Drag off the menu bar. Poof. Gone.

[Duff-Man]

Ummm... feeling a bit like an idiot now, but... how do you get it out of the menu bar?Duff-Man says...nevermind....what Stoid just said....oh yeah!

[cpjakes]

jsw - You can rearrange or remove all those little icons by holding Command and dragging them around or off of the menu bar. To get any of them back, search for ".menu" items, just double-click and they'll come back.

Raven VII - To get optical discs out, just hold down the mouse button on startup, it will eject the drive, sometimes in enough time to switch CDs if you need to boot from one.

cpjakes

[stoid]

Macs really ought to have manual optical drive eject. What if your computer went to hell and you can't boot into OS X, but you have a CD/DVD stuck in there?

Start up computer while holding down the mouse button. The sucker will pop right out as soon as the firmware loads. (not long after the Mac Gong sound effect)

I'm joining the Beat-To-The-Post Club Duff-Man. Have we got T-shirts yet? :p

[jsw]

Thanks to both stoid and Duff-Man! I tried shift, control, and option clicking. You'd think command-clicking would've come next, but I ended up looking into System Prefs. Time to go to sleep....

However, when I wake up tomorrow - I'm now going to explore the other menus there. It's fun to find a complete gap in my Mac knowledge. Well, it's rather common for me, I suppose. :) But these look interesting.

[Greenpants]

open Terminal and type the following- drutil tray eject

[janey]

another terminal thing is `hdiutil eject -force /dev/diskxxx` replace the xxx with the appropriate drive name, which you can use `df` to figure out (it'll show up in a /dev/disk(something) format. for example your main hard drive might show up as `/dev/disk0s3`.

or if you cant do that, you can always boot up into open firmware and type in `eject cd`. :)

[Kingsnapped]

Apple-click. Drag off the menu bar. Poof. Gone.

Wow, I was just wondering how to do that!

::nukes dial-up and ethernet icons::

Woo! Simplicity!