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I came into the situation yesterday of having to unarchive a pretty huge split file which was spread over two DVDs. I was out running a Games Night at my University and therefore away from my home PC and external hard drives, and with this year’s work drawing to near-completion, I didn’t have enough space to copy both files onto my hard drive and then extract it. (While I try and keep 30gb of space free normally, my Final Major Project takes up a lot more space than my usual workload!)

It was archived in a .rar format, meaning that I typically use Stuffit Expander to extract it out. There are other apps to do this, but I’ve always found Stuffit to be just fine for this sole function- .zips are handled by Apple’s built in Archive Utility as it’s just simple and quick. Extracting it out took quite some time for the first disk, meaning that I just went and played Mario Kart while it did so.

Coming back, it required the second disk, and unfortunately came up with a message similar to the one above when I tried to eject the first. Stuffit wasn’t quite smart enough to handle it on a separate process, and I didn’t feel like fumbling around for a paper clip to jab into my Disk drive wherever the force-eject button is. You can force eject it by restarting your machine and holding down the mouse button when you do so, but as I was half-way through extracting this wasn’t really feasible. From doing a bit of Googling on the subject, there are a lot of people with the same problem, without any answered method. Unfortunately it seems that the only way of doing it is via an app called Toast Titanium.

While you used to be able to get a trial version of this app, it appears that Roxio are being an arse about their new version. It seems to be the accepted norm that you are able to get a trial version of an App and then activate it later. Bit of a shame really, as it’s a sure-fire way of getting a Disk drive to eject. In the bottom-right hand corner of the main window, is an Eject button which seems to override anything that another Application is doing and force it to eject the disk. If you can find an older trial version online then go for it- it’s a pretty much sure-fire way of getting the disk out. As a result, the disk ejected, I put in the second disk which then mounted quite happily, and I carried on. Hooray. I think the problem comes down to that an application like Stuffit needs to run the unarchiving as a different process to it’s main GUI, which should then keep this from happening. Who knows, eh.

Nb. If you know of any other (free) app which does the same thing, then let me know. I’ve gone through a number of free alternatives like Burn, as well as free trials of my other favourite burning app Disco, but nothing else so-far has worked.