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Now here's something that won't happen with a PC

N

Ninja Viper

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 30, 2005
8
0
I am only 2 days old at Mac and this thing has got me ready to throw it out the Windows (<- hehe, bad joke). I burned a CD on my PC of emails that I want to import into Entourage. I put the CD in and the computer froze. You could hear it constantly scanning the disc, but not getting anywhere. 3 reboots later here I am. If I drag the CD icon to the trash it takes a while but does eventually dissapear, but the disc does not come out. Very frustrated, please help.

Mac Mini, OSX
 
to force eject the cd hold the mouse button down when you reboot

not sure what the problem could be with the disk though
 
that IS lame, and unusual. Do you have a Mac keyboard? If so, you can hold down the eject key right as you turn the Mini on, and hold it for a bit while it boots. oh yeah, or you can hold down the mouse while it boots.
 
Ninja Viper said:
PC keyboard, anyone know what the apple button and option are?
Click to expand...

The Apple key should be the equivlant of your Windows key and the Option key is the equivalent of your Alt key.
 
The holding the mouse button thing caused it to completely freeze while starting. Takes about 10 minutes to boot to where I can actually use it. Is there an eject keyboard shortcut?
 
Instead of getting frustrated and trying all these things, you might want to make use of Apple's decent support. This appears to be something beyond a simple issue, that Apple would most likely take care of for you. It's possible you have a bad optical drive. Had you put any other CDs in it before this one?
 
Unfortunately, as happy as I am with my switch to Mac, this is a problem that has really frustrated me as well. If a disc for whatever reason is unrecognized by the computer as being in the drive, it can be very difficult to get it out. Supposedly holding the mouse button down while booting will force an eject, but I've had several discs where this simply didn't work.

The following is supposed to allow you to truly force a disk to eject, although I've never tried it so I can't guarantee it will work. You have to boot into Open Firmware, which can be done by holding down Option-Command-O-F. Once you get to the Open Firmware prompt, type eject cd. In order to exit Open Firmware, type either mac-boot (to boot the machine) or shut-down (to shut the machine down).
 
If you can boot another reliable way of ejecting a CD is to open iTunes and use its Eject command.

Was the PC CD-R possibly a packet-written CD - the type where you can just keep dragging files onto it? For Mac compatibility with PC CD-Rs choose to do a Disk-at-Once burn instead.
 
If a disc ever refuse to work on my eMac, hitting Eject a few times normally works. (sometimes ia have to hold it down for a few secs though)
 
mduser63 said:
The following is supposed to allow you to truly force a disk to eject, although I've never tried it so I can't guarantee it will work. You have to boot into Open Firmware, which can be done by holding down Option-Command-O-F. Once you get to the Open Firmware prompt, type eject cd. In order to exit Open Firmware, type either mac-boot (to boot the machine) or shut-down (to shut the machine down).
Click to expand...

I've had the exact experience with a windows burned CD. For some reason some of my windows burned discs would not work in my Mac. Couldn't eject the disk no matter what. Only thing that worked was the Open firmware info above.

You may be able to read the CD on a Windows box. You'll have to try and burn it again.

Once you get past this issue you'll be on your way to much better things with your mini and Mac OS X.
 
I'm guessing that the poster's CD burner is not set to burn in the universally recognized format (ISO whatever-it-is).

How much is a copy of Move2Mac these days.
 
I've had disc read problems, holind the left click while booting has always popped the drive for me... I mean, it gives the command directly to your drive without reading the disc, so I have no clue why it wouldn't work...
 
yeah I am with agathon he probably burned it in a unrecognized format. sorta funny how ppl blame the machine for user error.
 
Aren't all CD's in CDFS format?

My thumb drives are in FAT format (making it readable by either OS). The only thing I have in NTFS is my boot/storage drives. Its for increased reliability and security.
 
superbovine said:
yeah I am with agathon he probably burned it in a unrecognized format. sorta funny how ppl blame the machine for user error.
Click to expand...

Well, I blame Microsoft for that too... ;)

If his burner was set to use a Windows only format that sucks. The default setting should always be the cross platform standard.

I guess it's weird to hear about problems like this. I never have problems. Mine just works... still. :)
 
Most CDs are ISO-9660, but because that standard only supports uppercase filenames, etc., everyone has these "extensions" to ISO-9660. Microsoft's version of these "extensions" is called Joliet.

As some wag once put it, the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
 
Well I had to take it into the Mac shop in order to get it out. Basically they just used the holding the mouse button down while booting to get it out (must have done it differently than I, cause I did try that). My Windows PC burner must have really messed up cause when you look at the burn on the CD that got stuck in the machine you can actually see small rings where it seems the burner skipped or something.
As for the burning it was done in CDFS but I used XP's built in burner to burn it which may have had something to do with it.
I still dislike the fact that mu OS controls ejecting the CD's but I will learn to live with it.
 
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