Disc stuck in drive...how often does this happen???

[VoodooDaddy]

I tell you what, I like this mini but I'm getting aggrevated with problems I didn't think I would be having with a Mac. I detailed a few minor ones in another thread, but then today I had a disc stuck and had to call apple tech support to get it out.

I put in a cdrw with a bunch of pictures on it, wanted to import them into iPhoto. The disc wouldn't mount, then when I hit eject nothing. So it hit it a few times, the eject symbol came up but it wouldn't eject.

So I hop online to search for an answer as I'd seen this problem here and other places. Before I could do anything I get a box pop up that said "you need to restart your computer by holding down the power button.

Had this happen a few times. Had to power off then back on. Found a couple of possible solutions but nothing worked. Tried the disc utility but since the disc wasn't reading that hung up. Tried the console, didn't work. Tried cmd- e, nothing. Then, once when I rebooted it said "cannot find your bluetooth keyboard" which I don't even have. Weird.

Called apple tech and they had me do a few things, one of which was to hold down the mouse button while rebooting. Well, I say reboot/restart but it wouldn't actually do the restart from the apple menu. It would just hang at the shutdown screen with the little circle thing spinning. I had to power off with the power button, then back on. Holding down the mouse key didn't work, so she put me on hold to look up something. While on hold I did the power off/on again with the mouse held down and it finally ejected.

This disc worked perfectly fine in my PC, but them again it doesn't have a slot load drive (which IMO is a bad move). This is just irritating.

Anyway, is this stuck disc a common problem?

 

[Makosuke]

Anyway, is this stuck disc a common problem?

Argh, I'd just finished writing my response when I accidentally closed the window. Take 2:

No, it's not. I read about it happening occasionally on forums like this, but I've maybe once seen it happen in several years of troubleshooting for fun and profit (99% of the time the Mac will just spit the disc back out as unreadable). Holding the mouse button down on startup is a pretty surefire way to take care of it, but a little pinhole eject would be nice.

With slim DVD drives having pretty much all the features of their huge 5.25" compatriots these days, "laptop" drives and slot-loaders are getting more and more common on compact and/or style-concious comptuers, even Windows boxes. Good or bad, that's just the way things are trending, and I wouldn't be half surprised to see the death of the full-sized 5.25" drive some day in the not so distant future. Regardless, a 5.25" drive is nearly as big as the entire Mini, so I can see why Apple goes with the slot loaders.

If you really hate it, you always have the option of buying, say, a Pioneer DVR-111D (or brand preference of your choice) for like $35 and a firewire case for $30 or so, and then you've got a perfectly good full-sized drive for around $70.