Forgive the stilted title but I want people to actually find this post. I recently loaned my black 2008 MacBook to a friend. They inserted a DVD but it refused to read and wouldn’t eject using the hardware key. Standard procedure in this case is to:

• Reboot the computer and hold down the trackpad button while booting. Disk will eject.

That didn’t work. This is what did work (somehow) and it’s scarcely mentioned online:

• Reboot the computer and hold down the ‘D’ key while booting. Disk will eject. You will be overjoyed.

The D key is normally used to tell the computer to read the install disk in the DVD drive and boot into hardware test mode. System profiler says that the Macbook doesn’t have an optical drive which is why I assume the first method doesn’t work. I hope this helps you.