Manually removing CD from drive

Press and hold the trackpad button during bootup. That forces an eject of a disc in the optical drive.

Or launch Disk Utility, highlight the CD and hit eject in the menu.

tcphoto1 wrote:
Or launch Disk Utility, highlight the CD and hit eject in the menu.

That only works if one can boot up the computer and launch Disk Utility. 😉

The OP stated the computer would not boot up (from the internal HDD), and with an optical disc stuck in the drive, booting from the Mac OS X DVD to launch DU would not work either. Now, if the OP had a bootable clone of his system on an external hard drive handy, then the MBP could have been booted from that, and DU run and used to eject the disc - but that was probably not the case, and certainly not the easiest solution in this instance.

Out of interest should this happen on the new MBP with no mouse buttons how would one proceed? Would I just hold my finger on the trackpad or would this be impossible? 🙂

The new MBP has a button. The whole track pad is a button that clicks when pressed. So just click and hold the track pad while booting.

Ooh I was not aware that the whole surface was a clickable button! Now I'm looking forward my new MBP even more 🙂