Stuck CD/DVD door

Our G4 tower's CD/DVD drive door is stuck closed. There's a disc in there right now, but it doesn't show up anywhere on the computer, so we can't even drag the icon to the trash to eject it.
Anybody have any ideas as to how we can get it open?
Thanks everyone,
Mitchell

If you open disk utility, can you see the disc in the menu on the left? If so, use the disk utility to eject it.

Otherwise, try restarting the computer with the mouse button held down.

The manual way is to stick the end of a paper clip
onto the small round hole that is on the lower front of the
drive--it unlocks the drive door--Jay

My Powerbook did that occasionally before the drive gave up entirely. I would "eject" the drive from Finder, the drive would disappear from Finder, but the disk didn't come out, and like you I wondered how to tell the computer to eject it when it didn't recognize that there was a disk in. The solution turned out to be to simply reboot, and when the computer came back up it recognized that there was a disk in the drive, and this time it would eject using the usual means. As far as the paper clip solution went, my PB didn't have the "little hole" on the drive so that wasn't a solution.

Don't know if this is similar to your situation, and if you've alread rebooted without luck then it probably isn't. But as I said, the drive died entirely a month or two later (wouldn't even TAKE a disk any more) so you might want to start making plans.

Scott

Slot Loading is zippy and super and very Mac-like, but it does tend to die more often than the older drawer type loading.

You would think the drawer (like on my older iBook) would die in a heartbeat because of having all that delicate mechanics sticking out like that, but the tiny rollers used in the slot loader can get faked out very easily and leave an unmounted disk in the machine.

Koz