Opening CD Drive without KB or Mouse?

[Vard]

OK...ran into a little problem last night...

Is there a way to open the CD drive without the KB before the system loads?

I seem to remember some older systems having a pinhole that allowed a manual eject...

First, last week I had to replace my Apple Pro Keyboard because I learned the hard way that it doesn't like the taste of an Iced Cappuccino--yeah, I thought it was crazy too!

Anyway, I purchased a nice Logitech Programable Keyboard that lets me get back all the funcationality of the Pro...volume control, CD eject...this and that.

Last night however, I realized that this only works after OS X loads the drivers. I came across this discovery when my system couldn't find the startup disk. I have had this problem once before and figured out how to use the OS 9 install disk to get into the control panel and select a disk...FIXED!

But last night I could get the drive open with the Logitech KB cause the drivers hadn't loaded yet. I was able to use the Pro Keyboard (which seems to work outside of OS X, but not inside it) to get the drive open and get things working again. But I can't rely on this forever...

Any suggestions would be EXTREMELY helpful.

Thanks,
Eddie

 

[ksv]

Hold down the mouse button before the system is loaded. That is, before anything is loaded

If you need to eject the disc during startup, I think you can open up the drive latch and press the eject button on the drive itself. I think it will work if the disc isn't mounted.

 

[Vard]

Wow...thanks for the quick reply KSV....I'll give it a shot when I get home at lunch...

--I love this forum--

Later,
Eddie

 

[dlloyd]

On all drives there should be some manual eject whole or something. I expect if you searth around near the drive you will probably find one

 

[Vard]

....by the way, the mouse trick worked perfectly. Thank you very much.

Found a new issue this morning. Every once in a while I like to boot to the console and run fsck -y to make sure things are doing ok. But I am back to my problem from earlier. My keyboard doesn't recognize the apple key until the drivers for it load in X.

So how do I stop the startup and get into the console...you know, the old command+S trick? I need a way around this little limitation so I can run fsck -y

Any help would be greatly appreciated...as always.

Thanks again,
Eddie

 

[ksv]

Originally posted by Vard
....by the way, the mouse trick worked perfectly. Thank you very much.

Found a new issue this morning. Every once in a while I like to boot to the console and run fsck -y to make sure things are doing ok. But I am back to my problem from earlier. My keyboard doesn't recognize the apple key until the drivers for it load in X.

So how do I stop the startup and get into the console...you know, the old command+S trick? I need a way around this little limitation so I can run fsck -y

Any help would be greatly appreciated...as always.

Thanks again,
Eddie

Open a Terminal window and enter

sudo nvram boot-args="-s"

Enter your password when prompted, and your computer will boot in single user mode as default
I think you can remove the boot argument by entering

sudo nvram boot-args=""