optical drive won't open

How can I manually open the optical drive on my Mac Pro? There is no paperclip hole that I can see. Thanks in advance.

(I searched for this and found nothing. It's hard to believe it hasn't been asked.)

Posted on Jul 10, 2008 6:23 PM

35 replies

Jul 14, 2009 2:49 PM in response to rohan_moore

Excellent suggestion!! It WAS the virtual machine (Parallels) that was tying up the optical drive. Thanks for the suggestion!! In my case, CDs and DVDs failed to mount on the desktop at all. And of course, burning software said that the drive was unavailable. After disconnecting it from the virtual machine, the discs appeared immediately on the Mac desktop. Voila!! Thanks again for the suggestion.

Jul 10, 2008 10:26 PM in response to Kevin Paul

reboot with the mouse button held down during start up seems to do the trick in most instances

ronbo58

Level 1

0 points

Jan 30, 2009 2:16 PM in response to Eran Becker

Ha!!
Thanks for the Retrospect tip.
I had installed the Retrospect 8 Beta 2.
The Retrospect Server prefpane was running.
I disabled it, and voila!
I have control of my main drive again...

bhaugmo

Level 1

0 points

May 26, 2009 1:23 AM in response to Malcolm Rayfield

it was never checked. so that cant be the issue. any other ideas?

GA Griff

Level 1

8 points

Sep 2, 2009 3:54 PM in response to Kevin Paul

I just figured out my problem was VMware. Just like Parallels it takes over the drive. Disable the drive and you get it back in OS X.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

optical drive won't open