Here’s the situation: our computer has died on us. For a few days it would just shut itself off every once in a while and then the other day, it went down for good. If we plug it in, and hit the switch, sometimes the light will flash and sometimes not, but it hasn’t stayed on when we try for at least two or three days now. I’m guessing it’s the power supply, but I’m not really up on this sort of thing.
Now, it was an old computer and frankly it just provided us with an excuse to buy a new one. Unfortunately we had just bought, and were in the process of installing, a new games CD.
Here’s the real question: how do I get the disk out of the stupid drive when I have no power to the computer. We’ve searched and tried opening the cabinet ourselves, we even managed to pop the drive out of the cabinet. But we can’t figure a way to manually open the drive.
The wife is wigging out. She really, really wanted to play the game that is now firmly entombed within the dead computer. We plan to take the computer to a repair place soon, but until then, is there anything we can do?
If there’s no manual eject hole, you may have to disassemble the drive, but only do this if you really need the CD and don’t ever hope to use the drive again - in order to get to the point where you can actually release the CD from the mechanism, you have to remove quite a lot of intricate parts, some of which seem to prefer breaking apart to being removed whole.
re: what GorillaMan said; you only need connect the drive power cable to make it possible to eject a CD - no need to fuss around with installing the drive in a drive bay - just open up the side of the computer (switched off), locate spare power connector, connect it, power up, eject CD, power down, unplug drive, replace cover.
