Thank you,
I've done everything except physically manipulate the device. I've tried holding the mouse down, trying to access firmware from startup, using onboard utilities and then investigating the specifics in /etc/dev.
Typically, there should be a device in the dev folder called cdrom whether it's mounted or not. Mounted devices are usually read in from the fstab file which merely lists their mount locations. I'm under the impression that the OS handles issues if the file system is of a conflicting type. Even it it is, most OS's are verbose enough to at least relay the directory structure of a mounted File System(device).
There is no cdrom under /etc/dev and nothing listed or commented out in the fstab. Therefore, there is nothing listed under disk utility. So the problem now isn't how to eject media, it's actually mounting the device that is supposed to read said media.
Most machines with an onboard disk device are recognized by the kernel fairly quickly. My Debian box automatically mounts each device, but it too follows the fstab during boot. If the device is corrput, it won't mount, but Linux boxes produce verbose output of startup scripts during boot.
I have no idea how OSX handles mounting issues or corrupt devices. The mac is still new and under warranty, so we will see a specialist concerning this but I am curious to see if anyone may be familiar with this problem. It seems quite novel for onboard devices such as this.
Thank you for taking the time to help me with this.
