Disks

Floppy drives disappeared from Macs beginning in 1997—and these days, they’re absent from most Windows PCs, too.

In the meantime, there are all kinds of other disks you can connect to a Mac these days: CDs and DVDs, hard drives, iPods, USB flash drives, and so on.

When you insert a disk, its icon may show up in any of three places (depending on your Finder preferences): on the right side of the desktop, in the Computer window, and in the Sidebar. To see what’s on a disk you’ve inserted, double-click its icon.

Tip

You can make the Mac work like Windows, if you choose. For example, to open a single window containing icons of all currently inserted disks, choose Go→Computer (which produces the rough equivalent of the My Computer window).

To save you that step, though, you can tell OS X to put disk icons on the desktop, too. Just choose Finder→Preferences, click General, and turn on the top checkboxes—“Hard disks,” “External disks,” and “CDs, DVDs, and iPods.”

To remove a disk from your Mac, use one of these methods:

  • Hold down the key on your keyboard. Mac keyboards, both on laptops and desktops, have a special Eject key (), usually in the upper-right corner. Hold it down for a moment to make a CD or DVD pop out. (If you don’t have an key, hold down F12 instead.)

  • Drag its icon onto the Trash icon. For years, this technique has confused and frightened first-time Mac users. Their typical reaction: Doesn’t the Trash mean “delete”? Yes, but only when you drag file or folder icons there—not disk icons. Dragging a disk icon into the Trash (at the end of the Dock) makes the Mac spit the disk out. (If you drag a disk image icon or the icon of a networked disk, this maneuver unmounts them—that is, gets them off your screen.)

    The instant you begin dragging a disk icon, the Trash icon on the Dock changes form, as though to reassure the novice that dragging a disk icon there will only eject the disk. As you drag, the wastebasket icon morphs into a giant-sized logo.

  • Highlight the disk icon, and then choose File→Eject (or press ⌘-E). The disk pops out.

  • Right-click the disk icon. Choose Eject from the shortcut menu.

  • Click the button next to a disk’s name in the Sidebar.

Any of these techniques also work to get network disks and disk images off your screen.

Note

If you try to eject a disc and the Mac tells you, “This disk is in use,” the message tells you exactly which program is still holding onto the disk. Switch to that program, close whatever document is causing the problem, and then eject the disk.

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