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May 18, 2005
Evil Disk
The photo printer I had crapped out on me a few weeks ago. I found out that refurbishing/repairing the printer was as costly as a new one, so I purchased a new machine.
Once the printer was out of the box and plugged in, it was time to install the printer software on my laptop. I inserted the disk into the drive and not a second later heard my laptop choking on the disk, whirring and whirring as I watched that damned Apple beachball (aka, progress indicator, which I've renamed the regress indicator) spin on my screen. Horrors! A bad disk! Damn that Hewlett-Packard! How do I get the disk out of the drive?
Lucky for me, I was able to access the HP web site and downloaded the latest printer driver while the evil disk whirred non-stop in my disk drive. I successfully installed the printer driver and an hour later, the disk drive finally stopped its horrific gagging and I was able to remove it from the drive. *sigh* Even though I tried to Force Quit the disk kept going, and going, and... surely there's an easy (?) way to purge a disk from one's G4, isn't there?
Cindy
Comments
Don't Macs still have the little hole you can shove a paper clip in to eject the tray?
Brain matter deposited by: Al on May 18, 2005 9:53 PM
The disk drive on this PowerBook G4 is internal - no pop out tray. I thought of the pin hole also; though If there's one on this laptop, I've not a clue where it is.
Brain matter deposited by: Cindy on May 18, 2005 11:06 PM
No pin-hole on the slot loaders. You can try DiskUtility, you can also drop to the Unix command line and umount -f the device (f in this case stands for force).
Brain matter deposited by: YouKnowWho on May 22, 2005 6:41 AM
BTW I don't think HP printers have shipped with current MacOS X drivers since about the release of Windows 2000. HP can't cope with a vendor who updates their OS more than once in a decade...
Brain matter deposited by: YouKnowWho on May 22, 2005 6:43 AM
The HP printer I purchased came with software for OS X up to 10.3... but you're correct in that HP doesn't update its (OS X) drivers to keep up with OS updates.
Brain matter deposited by: Cindy on May 23, 2005 7:54 AM