Eject or boot from a CD or DVD at startup

To eject a disc that won’t pop out if you try to eject it in the Finder (Cmd-E):

1. turn on or restart the Mac



2. hold down the Eject button on the keyboard (Apple keyboard required, of course).

To boot from a CD or DVD that you’ve inserted while the Mac is running:

1. select Restart from the Apple menu



2. hold down the “C” key as soon as the Mac restarts.

You can let go as soon as the little rotator appears under the apple icon.

If you don't want to restart, you can open the terminal and enter:

disktool -l

Find the disk number for the CD or DVD (probably disc2, but it is disk3 on my MacBook Pro) and then enter:

disktool -e disk#



where # is the number of the CD or DVD