CD/DVD Drive Ate your Disk?
April 20, 2009 5:08 pm Basic Skills, Information, Technical, Tips
Many have experienced the situation, an optical drive that eats your media unwilling to spit it out. may it be an important document archive you need for work of your expensive operating system installer, you have to get it out, how? Most techies know that these optical drives come with a mechanical fail safe to allow ejection of the drive should the tray become stuck inside or a mechanical belt become broken (older drives). The motor on the ejection tray can also get stuck due to a paperclip or sheet of paper your toddler stuck in the drive when you weren’t looking.
Many drives come with a seemingly opened up paperclip as part of the box’s contents that can be used to push at the gear that opens the optical drive. Ever wonder why the drive has a pinhole right in the front panel? That’s what that paperclip looking thingy’s for. You simply push into that very hole to disengage the locking mechanism that keeps the drive shut, pushing it out a bit allowing you to manually pull the tray. Please do this when the system is shutdown for the move may activate the motor and damage the disk that you are about to rescue. If the optical drive is a few years old, then you may have to get a new one for the motors and switches may have already lived past their useful life.