I recently purchased a Pioneer DVR-A06U DVD±R/RW to replace my failing DVD-ROM which shipped in my G4/400. This is the PC retail version of Apple's SuperDrive, compatible with all of Apple's iApps and is also bootable.
Excited to put my new drive through it's paces, I ran Toast 6 and burned a CD. When it was done, I clicked the eject button in Toast, but the drive tray did not open. I went to Finder to try and drag the CD to the trash, only there was no CD mounted to drag to Trash. So I pressed the physical eject button and nothing. The eject button on my keyboard and the Eject menu extra also failed to open the drive tray so I could remove my CD.
Figuring this was a bug in Toast, I used my trusty straightened paperclip to manually release the drive tray via the emergency eject hole--found on the front of almost every optical drive ever made--and removed my CD. Only problem is that any CD I inserted into the drive after that did not mount and even worse, the drive didn't even show up in Disk Utility! I proceeded to restart my system only to have it hang at shutdown. A forced reboot later and my drive is working fine again, happily ejecting CDs every which way I want to.
A week goes by and one day it happens again, only this time I wasn't using Toast, I was simply ejecting a CD from the Finder using the eject button on my keyboard. The volume unmounts, but the drive tray doesn't eject the physical media. Because the volume is already unmounted, I can't use any of the standard methods of ejecting a disk from Finder (i.e.: dragging to Trash, Cmd-E or choosing eject from the File menu).
Read the rest of the hint for the solution...
All other methods of ejecting CDs on the Mac that I know of also failed to eject the physical media including:
This time I refused to reboot my Mac! I searched around on the internet and came across this hint at osxfaq.com, by Adrian Mayo, about using the Terminal command disktool -l to list all mounted volumes and the associated BSD disk numbers to identify which disk to eject using the disktool -e disk# command (where # is the corresponding BSD disk number). Only problem is that as before, the volume had already been unmounted, so the drive didn't show up when using the disktool -l command.
On a whim, I ran System Profiler (Apple menu -> About This Mac -> More Info, or by running /Applications -> Utilities -> System Profiler). Not only did the drive appear there under ATA devices, but it also listed the unmounted volume of the disc that was stuck in the drive AND the BSD disk#, which it listed as "disk3". So I fired up Terminal and typed:
disktool -e disk3 [Return]
My drive magically popped open and I was able to remove the CDROM. Not only that, but the drive functioned normally from that point on as I inserted different CDs and ejected them and even burned a few. No paperclip or restart necessary!
I'm sure there is an easy way to make this hint a double-clickable script, but I'll leave that for someone to post in the comments section. Hope this will help anyone else who is experiencing this problem. I gather from what I have found on the internet that I am not the only person to run into this issue.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031203232530190