Stuck drives in iMacs were one of the biggest PITAs back when I moonlighted as first line tech support, not that long ago. (We had a few hundred of them with a lot of use, so it cropped up frequently.) My fallback option (when I could reach the terminal, i.e. not a hardware problem) was “drutil tray eject” which is short for opening the Disk Utility and ejecting it from there.
On older macs (pre-Intel) you could also get into the Open Firmware prompt while booting and work it from there.
I got to do some DIY work on our older iMacs that were out of warranty and got the “do or die” stamp from the manager. Back then, there was a site online that had the iMac service manuals lying around, but I see that they’ve gotten a C&D from Apple and’ve removed them. Obviously you don’t want to do this with a mac that’s still in warranty, since they can easily tell when a box’s been opened, but if it’s out of warranty it’s not terribly hard to remove the back lid and get access to the drive.
My only tip is to bring a high resolution camera and take photos of everything while you work. And be really, really careful with the screws - they’re not meant for a lot of handling and the screwheads are exceptionally soft and easy to destroy.
Stuck drives in iMacs were one of the biggest PITAs back when I moonlighted as first line tech support, not that long ago. (We had a few hundred of them with a lot of use, so it cropped up frequently.) My fallback option (when I could reach the terminal, i.e. not a hardware problem) was “drutil tray eject” which is short for opening the Disk Utility and ejecting it from there.
On older macs (pre-Intel) you could also get into the Open Firmware prompt while booting and work it from there.
I got to do some DIY work on our older iMacs that were out of warranty and got the “do or die” stamp from the manager. Back then, there was a site online that had the iMac service manuals lying around, but I see that they’ve gotten a C&D from Apple and’ve removed them. Obviously you don’t want to do this with a mac that’s still in warranty, since they can easily tell when a box’s been opened, but if it’s out of warranty it’s not terribly hard to remove the back lid and get access to the drive.
My only tip is to bring a high resolution camera and take photos of everything while you work. And be really, really careful with the screws - they’re not meant for a lot of handling and the screwheads are exceptionally soft and easy to destroy.
Possibly. With tray-loading drives, the computer makers didn’t hide the eject button. The issue from the manufacturer’s point of view is that there wasn’t a standard for the location of the button on the front of the drive, and that different brands (and sometimes even models within a brand) used a different style of mounting the front cover to the drive tray. That meant that the notebook maker needed to create a variety of different replacement front covers. They normally did this to match the color and/or shape of the notebook chassis.
With slot-load drives, many manufacturers create designs which simply remove the front cover of the drive and hide the drive behind the case, which just has the slot for media and no hole to reach the eject button.
I’m surprised that the drive manufacturers didn’t standardize on a location for the eject button (and possibly a universal faceplate), given that the shape of the drive and the position of the I/O connector on the back is standardized.
I switched to slot-load drives for the servers I build, but those retain the drive faceplate and thus have access to the eject button. The reason I switched is that the chassis manufacturer I use still uses a slightly too-small opening for the drive, which means that the faceplate in tray-load drives tends to bind. They don’t build enough of them for me to justify re-doing the tooling to make the correct-sized opening.
The last tray-loading Mac I had was a G4 QuickSilver. I’m pretty sure it needed a paperclip, and didn’t have a button. That was ages ago (in computer time), and so my memory may be failing me.