I have a white MacBook, running Snow Leopard, 10.6.3 with the latest updates.

I popped in a DVD that the system failed to mount. I did not see any conspicuous errors. As a result of this failure, the DVD got stuck in the drive. Neither pressing the eject button on the keyboard nor running the diskutil eject command caused the DVD to come out. The commands drutil eject and drutil tray open could not get the DVD to budge at all. The 'mount' and 'eject' buttons on the window for Disk Utility are dimmed out, while it is written in the middle for the DVD drive that that particular disc drive is busy.

This is not the first time this has happened with me. I know that I will ultimately have to resort to rebooting the system and holding down the eject button to get the DVD to come out. But, is there any workaround that does not involve rebooting the system and prying the disc out? The drive on this MacBook does not have a needle-pin reset button -- at least, I couldn't find it anywhere.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Many thanks.