Mac interface gotchas (was: Finding errors in manuals)

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Kevin Amery noted: <<One time I put a CD that looked ok from the top  
but was completely cracked on the bottom in a G4. I ended up having  
to pry the drive open while the machine was off to get it out,  
because (in Apple's infinite wisdom) you couldn't eject the drive  
until it actually showed up in the Finder, and that wouldn't happen  
until it had successfully read the disk. This was around OS 9.1 or  
thereabouts.>>

Or, having read the user manual or online help, you could have  
inserted a straightened paperclip in the small hole to the right of  
the drive, thereby triggering the manual eject mechanism. <gdrlh>

<<On a PC, of course, you'd just hit the Eject button on the front  
while the POST was running, but Mac's are more elegant than that.  
Apparently eject buttons spoil the styling.>>

This is actually a good feature, and at the time, a particularly wise  
one: the Mac OS, like many operating systems at the time, could  
encounter significant problems with crashes or data corruption if you  
ejected a disk while it was in use--particularly for mounted drives,  
but also for CDs. I got nailed this way once in Windows, which  
happily let me eject a disk while it was in use, then crashed hard,  
losing data and corrupting an open file.

Given that many minor crises are precipitated by accidentally nudging  
the eject button during a read or write operation, this design made  
good sense because it protected users from the more common problem  
(ejecting disks at inappropriate times, which happens much more often  
than ejecting stuck disks). I believe there's a simple OS 9 menu  
command that will eject a disk whether or not it appears in the  
Finder, but I don't have a copy currently running so I can check.  
Nonetheless, modern operating systems can handle the problem more  
gracefully, and it would make sense to reconsider this design choice.

I belatedly note that my current Powerbook lacks that little manual  
eject button, so I'll have to research what to do about stuck disks.  
The F12 key is supposed to do the trick, but I'm not quite ready to  
test this without first reading the docs to ensure it will work in  
the situation you described. <g>



----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
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