iMac Super Drive seemed to be stuck/broken. Seemed!

I recently had an unpleasant experience with the slot-in Super Drive in my 2011 iMac: the empty drive did not take in dvds nor cds – when I tried inserting disks they went halfway through and then something seemd to block the disks.

I rebooted, pressed the eject button multiple times, resetted pram and nvram, nothing happened. Drive seemed to be broken, Disk Utility and System Information showed an empty drive.

Since this is my main work machine, I was not too happy about the thought to bring it to a certified reseller, waiting for at least a week to be repaired etc.. (there is still not a single apple store in Austria, hello Apple? Even Bologna has an Apple Store!)

Some googling brought up the idea of tapping the disks inside the drive, applying a bit of force (which seemed not to be a brilliant idea without breaking anything nor did it work). Not to talk about the “solution” with using 2 plastic credit cards..

Finally I fould a useful post searching the Apple support communities and Dan8954’s suggestion did save my day: The command

drutil eject

typed into the terminal unlocked the drive (somehow it seemd to have thought there is a disk in the drive) – since then it is working flawlessly again.


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