I’m going to start a small series on fixing things. With three boys around the house, I’m pretty much always fixing something, and I hope that my adventures might be helpful to others.

Recently my iMac stopped reading optical disks. It acted like there was a disk in the drive, but the drive wasn’t spinning up and I couldn’t eject it. I tried all of the suggested options short of holding it sideways and shaking it. I tried the following:

1. Press the eject button (Duh!)
2. Hold down the mouse button while rebooting.
3. Reset the Pram (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379)
4. Reset the SMC (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964)
5. Use Disk Utility, select the CD drive and click Eject.

None of these worked, and finally, I found a solution. From a terminal session, execute the following:

drutil eject

It worked and I’m happily burning disks again! Hopefully this will help you too!