Disc Eject Button on Keyboard

What keyboard are you using? You can try holding down F12 as an interim solution.

Are you using an Apple keyboard or one by a third party? If it is by a third party I would visit that website and see if there are Tiger specific drivers. If it is an Apple keyboard it sounds like a coincidence with the keyboard not working and it might just be a bad keyboard.

Make sure you have run software update and installed all the tiger related updates.

if you might have spilled anything on the keyboard, your key might be dead... usually it's more than just one so check if the keys around it work. There's this cool thing that shows you if the keys are responding or not.
Go to the blue apple> System Preferences> International> Input Menu
then check on "keyboard viewier". An American Flag will show up next to the clock on the top right, go to it, then open "Show Keyboard Viewer". press keys and see if they work or not.


Also try this... Turn off your mac, then turn it back on, press and hold the mouse button (left button if you have a 2 button mouse) when you hear the mac chime and hold it. If you did it right, your CD should open up right on start-up. one the computer turns all the way on, if you press your eject key, the tray should close.

dolbinau wrote:
What keyboard are you using? You can try holding down F12 as an interim solution.

You have to disable the Dashboard first since it uses F12, unless there is a way to reassign it. I don't care for Dashboard myself, so disabled it completely to free up the resources, so my keyboard now works fine with F12 opening and closing the optical drive.
Patrick

The problem may be simpler than anything else mentioned to date. Tiger 10.4 added a built-in, non-user-changeable delay on the keyboard media eject button. A quick press of the eject key no longer suffices; you need to press the key down and keep it down for about a full second before the optical tray will open or close.

I find myself in the same situation - installed 10.5.1 on my G4 (up from 10.3.9) 12/30/07, noticed immediately the delayed response on my Apple keyboard; noticed yesterday it seemed unresponsive, confirmed that just now - no response to short, long, or very long pressing.

I enjoy Dashboard and don't wish to disable it (as suggested above) just to get at my F12 key, but now I can't put any CD/DVD in. If there's a temporary way to shift Dashboard to another F key, that would be nice, but I'd like my eject button to work.

You're not alone, pogues01.

In OS X 10.4 and earlier you could add a menubar eject icon you can click with the mouse to open the optical tray by double-clicking on /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Eject.menu

Have you checked in the 10.5 usage forum to see if anyone else has experienced sudden loss of the optical eject key? I wonder if downloading and applying the stand-alone 10.5.1 updater would help?

+I enjoy Dashboard and don't wish to disable it (as suggested above) just to get at my F12+

You can assign any keyboard shortcut you like to dashboard. System Prefs > Keyboard and Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts

To change the Dashboard, Open up System Preferences, click on Dashboard & Expose (in Leopard "Spaces & Expose"), under Keyboard Shortcuts open up the menu for Dashboard and choose another F key (make sure Expose does not use it. Any iBook laptop users reading this, the eject key is F12. To activate Dashboard on F12, hold the fn key while pressing F12.

In Leopard, for the eject button in the menu bar, use Mac Pilot to enable this feature along with other features in one of those buttons. NOTE: THIS IS A TRIAL-WARE (SHAREWARE). USE IT WISELY!!! 😉 . This is a free download.

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