Mac Switcher

Usually, we use the following methods to eject a disk on Mac OS X.

Trash it

Drag and drop the disk icon to “Trash” on Dock.

F12 key

This is simplest. Press and hold the “F12″ key on your keyboard. It is a Mac OS X keyboard shortcut to eject disk.

Note: You may need to press down “fn” (function) key as well.

However, if the disk is stuck then the above methods may not work, you may need to try the following less known tricks to eject stuck disk on Mac OS X.

Disk Utility

Disk Utility is very useful disk monitoring application that comes with Mac OS X. It can be found in “Utilities” folder under “Applications”.

To eject disk, click on the disk which is listed on left sidebar, then click the “Eject” icon on toolbar to eject the disk.

Terminal

Mac OS X core is based on UNIX, therefore, you also get the powerful command line based Terminal in “Utilities” folder. Here is the command to eject a disk from Mac drive:
drutil tray eject

The disk will be ejected after you pressed “enter” key.

My two cents

Yes, there are other methods to eject Mac OS X disk but they required to restart Mac (e.g. hold down mouse button at startup), which is not good if you are still running some other applications.

Do you still have other tricks to eject disk without restarting Mac OS X? Share with us!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 4:02 am and is filed under Tips & Tricks, Mac OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.