OS X: Eject an Unbalanced CD

I love my Mac Mini, but it does have a few issues. Perhaps foremost is that the CD drive sucks. Some CDs are not just unreadable, but actually create a ridiculous amount of noise and bring the machine to a grinding halt. The problem seems to be that the drive physically isn't mounted rigidly enough, and the spindle not strong enough, to manage some CDs once they get to spinning at speed. Cheaply printed CDs, home CDs with labels on them, and CDs with stickers (i.e. library-tagged CDs) tend to have the most problems. It's not clear to me why the machine locks up, but it's presumably trying to read the drive and/or freaking out. You'd be upset too if something was spinning out of control at 30000 RPMs inside your head.

Strategies to deal with this include:

• Wait until the CD stops and the machine recovers
  • Use disktool to Eject An Ignored CD (remember, it won't be mounted)
  • Hold down F12 or your Eject key if you're fortunate enough to have one
• Kill the machine
  • As it reboots, hold down the left mouse button. Eventually, during the grey screen, the CD should stop and eject.

Unfortunately, the mini has no paperclip pinhole for a truly manual CD eject. This is probably a good thing: the theory is that you can really trash your drive doing that too much.