My hard disk crashed and I need to reinstall Mac OS X. I restart, insert the installation DVD, press c on the keyboard and the dvd ejects. I've tried different DVDs, even CDs. It's a Macbook Pro from march 2008.
Is it broken? Or can it be something more severe like the firewire controller on the motherboard (since I noticed this after my hard drive started to act strangely)? I've ran Apple Hardware Test successfully.
I had the exact same fault. The drive is faulty and needs to be replaced.
Just did something that worked for me. After trying to insert a Leopard install DVD several times with all results ending in it being ejected, I lay the laptop so the back of the display side was resting on the floor, resulting in the keyboard side being 90 degrees to the floor. I inserted the DVD downwards into the slot, and it was recognized!
I can't assume that it would be this easy for anyone else, but it worked for me, so you may as well give it a try.
You could try using a CD cleaning disc first. Some people have reported this cures it.
Mine only ejects blank discs. And it's rather rare for me to burn anyway.
It seems to be an issue with slot-loading disc drives - I have this problem with two separate machines (an original Macbook Pro, and an iMac G5) - both drives will work with most discs fine, but with others it constantly eject them, as you describe (it's happened with some writable CD/DVD's, the OS X install disc, a game installer DVD etc - no obvious reason or pattern..)
They are both well outside any kind of warranty, and since the iMac is horrible to open up (it seems to be constructed with selotape and tinfoil..), and I rarely use the DVD drive on the laptop, I ended up buying an external USB DVD-burner - which you can buy them for about £30 now..
PPC machines cannot boot of a USB device, but luckily the internal drive would take the OS X install disc fine.. If that fails, you can boot from a secondary harddrive partition, or disc-image, which could be setup from a different machine
First of all, are you sure you´re doing it with the right timing? This may sound silly, but if you try to insert the DVD to quickly (e.g. at the time your Mac chimes) it will throw it out in the instant - just keep on holding the "c"-key and after a few seconds feed it the DVD. Also, how exactly did you try different CDs? Are they all bootable? And lastly: do you have an external Hard Drive? Then you could try booting from it (for instance by cloning the Mac OS X disk onto it).
