Paging MacBook pros

[Eagle]

My daughter has a problem with her MacBook Pro and I need help with remote diagnosis and repair. She's at a university in South America, so even if I knew anything about MacBooks, it's not like I can work on it myself.

 

Here's her description of the problem:

 

I'm writing because I have a question and I think that you can help me...
About three weeks ago I put a cd on my computer that didn't came out. Since that day I have been trying to take it out with every way that's on the internet like restart the computer and force the exit, restart and press f12. I went to the terminal port and I wrote a code and nothing has happened. I only hear an awful noise that's getting worse and my computer is slow, and I'm worried. I thought about shutting down the cd drive so the computer doesn't  keep doing extra effort, but I don't know how to do that...

 

Any ideas?

[87MJTIM]

Most CD drives have a pin hole in the front.  This a manual opening override.  She should take a paperclip, straighten it out, and push it in to the pin hole.  This has worked for me.

 

Disclaimer: I do not, and have not owned a Mac.  I don't know if Apple puts the pin hole on them.

[Ωhm]

Google search "macbook pro dvd stuck". Mentions something about Re Starting w/mouse key held down and eject key on keyboard.

[Money_Pits]

based on the awful noise, I'd assume hardware failure, though trying the above should still be done just in case.  Older Macbook Pros did have the manual pin hole, but not the ones made in the last few years.

 

[gogmorgo]

I'm also thinking mechanical failure. Possibly something got caught in the drive and jammed it up. Those drives are pretty forceful, and don't really take no for an answer when they're spitting out a cd, and could easily have forced itself until it broke. 

They aren't that complex a machine to disassemble, with he right tools at least. I imagine you should also be able to find a new disc drive online.

 

About a year ago, my brother, who is about as mechanically savvy as a doorstop, managed to fix his own MacBook Pro. His hard drive took a dump, and the tech at the Apple Store said he could fix it, but only back to factory which would be expensive, and told him what he really should do was take it down to some other computer store around the corner and they could put in a SSD for half the price. The other store said they couldn't do it either but he should buy one online and install it himself. But once he got home where he could do the work, he had no way to connect to the Internet to read the guides, so he called me. I've never had a MacBook apart either, but I found a decent write up with good photos, and walked him through the process, over the phone. Then I even managed to successfully walk him through the process of recovering data on the old drive, which both the Apple Store tech and that other place had told him was impossible. (The trick is using an older and "obsolete" version of OSx's disc utility.)

So if my brother can repair a MacBook with instructions over the phone from someone who's never done it or even had a computer apart for almost ten years, I'd say anyone can do it.