Did you ever get a disk stuck in your drive? Nothing seems to work—you’ve pressed the button a million times, tried to open by right-clicking the drive and choosing “eject”, maybe even contemplated using a screw driver to pry the thing open.

Before you take out the drive and try to surgically remove the disk, or worse, buy a new drive, try this simple little trick to manually open your disk drive tray.

1. Unwind a paperclip.

2. Stick it in the little hole on the drive tray, usually near the eject button.

You heard me right. There’s a little hole you probably never even noticed. It’s the manual release for the drive tray.

I know it saved me many times with those pesky disks.

~ David