CD won't eject

[tutt96]

Working on a friend's G4. Trying to burn a CD in Tiger. The process stopped with an error about losing the connection. But the progress bar won't close and I can't eject the CD. Barber pole spinning, but the rest of the system seems to be fine.

I don't know the administrator password so I don't want to restart the machine...

Any help, greatly appreciated

[Raven]

Hit the Command + Options + Esc keys together to bring up the Force Quit menu. See if you can see the process there and then quit it. it shouldn't ask for a password to Force quit. If its the finder burning, then you can select the finder and relaunch it.

[tutt96]

OK, thanks...the progress bar is gone. But the folder with the burn symbol is locked and I can't eject the CD.

Do you know if this was a common or simple problem?

thanks again

[Raven]

What G4 model are you woking on ? Is it a tower, a laptop ? And what type of cd drive is it. Is it a slot loading cd drive or regular tray drive ?

[tutt96]

It is a Quicksilver Tower with a tray loading CD.

[Raven]

Then just bellow the tray, usually towards the right side, there should be a little hole about the right size for a paperclip. So straighten out a paper clip or any other metal rod of the same size, slide it into the little hole and push a bit. This will manually push out the tray.
Take a look at this (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88215) Apple kb article for more details on these steps for the QuickSilver.

[kainewynd2]

You should also be able to boot into Open firmware (CMD+Opt+O+F on boot) and type:

eject cd

If that doesn't work, you've got some hardware problems; then I would suggest the paperclip and a replacement drive.

[Raven]

The whole idea behind using the paper clip was that since the user doesn't have the password to login to the machine, the Open Firmware solution was not a viable idea. Thats the only reason why I did not propose it.

[tutt96]

The owner of the machine was back in the office today. He restarted the machine and the CD popped out...no paper clips

I incorrectly assumed his workstation connected to the network via Ethernet.

He has experienced this before. Apparently there is a latency issue when trying to burn a CD over the Airport network.

I should have made a local copy of the files I was trying to burn. A caveat of Tiger's way of processing alias files vs. Panther actually creating a copy before burning, both better than Jaguars Disk Image process...IMO

thanks again