Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Matthew Attoe · May 14, 2004, 08:09 AM

Hi,

One of our our dual 2gigs insists on ejecting the cd/dvd drive (with or without a cd/dvd in it) everytime it is restarted.

It is running OS X 10.3.3 with 2Gb of RAM.

I've tried zapping the PRAM, repairing priviledges but that's about all I can do. Can't even reboot from the OSX disc to run Disk Utility or DiskWarrior, because it just ejects them,even if I specify to boot from them in the Sysem Preferences.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Matthew

Boochie · May 14, 2004, 08:44 AM

What type of mouse do you have? I had a similar problem when I was using a third party (Kensington) mouse. The problem disappeared when I went back to the Apple mouse. I then switched to a Logitech mouse, which also was fine.

Matthew Attoe · May 14, 2004, 09:17 AM

Thanks for the reply.

The G5 in question did have a third-party mouse attached (packard-bell), so I tried it with the supplied apple mouse, but the same thing happens :-(, but thanks for the pointer.

Cheers,

Matthew

Boochie · May 14, 2004, 09:37 AM

Do you have any other third-party USB devices? If so, try disconnecting them.

Matthew Attoe · May 14, 2004, 10:05 AM

No, nothing else, unfortunately.

We have four other equally-specced G5's and they're all fine. Just this one problem mac.

Thanks,

Matthew

Boochie · May 14, 2004, 12:21 PM

Sorry, I'm out of ideas then. I've seen a number of reported cases where third-party USB devices caused the behavior you're seeing, but you've got something else going on.

Now, have you tried booting the machine without the keyboard or mouse connected?

Link · May 14, 2004, 12:43 PM

The other problem MIGHT be that the drive somehow is accidentally installed so that it's shoved up against the front of the case (or something up there) and that could be causing the button to be 'permanently' pressed, or it could be a glitch in the PRAM (highly unlikely) --

Methinks a faulty drive.

The two things that eject a drive at startup (normally) would be holding down the eject button or holding down the main mouse button.

Matthew Attoe · May 15, 2004, 05:49 PM

I'll have to have a closer look on Monday when I get back to work.

Thanks for the input tho'.

Cheers,

Matthew

Matthew Attoe · May 17, 2004, 02:47 AM

Sorted it. It was the mouse, after all.

When I unplugged the mouse, I forgot that there is a wireless receiver plugged into the back of the guys monitor. He took that out and it works fine everytime now.

Thanks for all the help,

Matthew

Link · May 17, 2004, 04:15 AM

Heheh, glad to hear it's alright now

Boochie · May 17, 2004, 08:05 AM

Ah ha! I had a feeling it was mouse-related, but I was stumped when you said that didn't originally make a difference.

Why this behavior persists is mystifying to me -- you'd think Apple would know that this problem exists with various third party mice and fix it.

Originally posted by Matthew Attoe:
Sorted it. It was the mouse, after all.

When I unplugged the mouse, I forgot that there is a wireless receiver plugged into the back of the guys monitor. He took that out and it works fine everytime now.

Thanks for all the help,

Matthew

tooki · May 18, 2004, 05:38 PM

It's not some weird bug, it's a defect in those mice.

All Macs without CD eject buttons (that is, the ones that have Eject on the keyboard only) let you eject a disc by holding down the mouse button on startup. This is in case a boot disc has been left in, and it's set to boot from it. This lets you get out of that loop.*

Apparently those other mice are mistakenly starting out as "I have the button down" instead of "I have the button up".

tooki

*It actually goes back much farther. Back when Macs had floppies, they would try to boot from floppy first (like any other computer back then). So they let you eject a floppy on startup by holding down the mouse button. They just continued the tradition to the CD drive when they dropped the floppy.

SMacTech · May 19, 2004, 08:06 AM

My Dad's sawtooth CD tray always opened when he booted. He had a 3rd party keyboard, and after reading this thread I asked him to unplug it and try what happened. Well sure enough, the tray didn't eject. I always hated that keyboard when I tried to use it and now he has reason to get a Apple Pro keyboard.
Thanks for this information, as my Dad thought his G4 was starting to die a slow hardware death.

zigzag · May 19, 2004, 05:45 PM

Originally posted by Matthew Attoe:
Hi,

One of our our dual 2gigs insists on ejecting the cd/dvd drive (with or without a cd/dvd in it) everytime it is restarted.

I'm glad you got it fixed - a person could get hurt if their whole optical drive was ejected every time they restarted.

Matthew Attoe · May 20, 2004, 08:55 AM

What i mea... actually, no, I can't be bothered

Ratspittle · May 21, 2004, 07:31 AM

I have the same problem, and it all started when I temporarily took out the superdrive I recently installed to obtain the serial # (for warranty). Before that, it was not happening. There were no mouse switchings during that time either... and sometimes it ejects after login as well

Ratspittle · May 22, 2004, 01:08 PM

it happens when I wake from sleep too.

chrisroos · 10:08 PM

Thanks for the info it was helpful. I did not want to stop using my Wacom wireless mouse so upon reading all of the post, I installed the latest driver and it was still happening. But I discovered that it only happens when the mouse is on the tablet. It was reading the post about the mouse being down that led to the assumption that maybe when the mouse is on the tablet it's being read as mouse down. Thanks for all the info, I was starting to think it was a conspiracy.

O