How to Use the macOS drutil Command to Manage Optical Drives

The Legacy Hardware Problem

Modern Apple laptops have not included a physical CD or DVD drive in over a decade. However, if you work in an old-school audio engineering studio, a government archiving facility, or a medical imaging lab, optical media is still a harsh reality. You likely have a massive external USB SuperDrive plugged into your Mac Studio.

When an optical drive fails, it is usually a catastrophic mechanical failure. The disc gets physically jammed inside the machine, and the graphical macOS interface completely freezes when it tries to read the corrupted data. You cannot click the “Eject” button on your keyboard because the operating system is unresponsive to graphical commands.

To bypass the frozen graphical interface and forcefully communicate with the physical motors and lasers inside the optical drive directly through the command line, you must use the drutil (Drive Utility) command.

Step 1: Open the Terminal

Because you are communicating directly with an external hardware peripheral, you do not necessarily need root administrator privileges for the basic commands.

1. Press Command + Space to open Spotlight Search.
2. Type Terminal and press Enter.

Step 2: Forcefully Ejecting a Jammed Disc

If a scratched DVD is spinning endlessly inside the drive, causing the entire Mac to lag, you must force the physical tray to open.

Instead of relying on the keyboard shortcut, type the following command into the terminal:

drutil eject

This command sends a raw, low-level signal directly down the USB cable, commanding the optical drive’s internal motor to physically eject the disc, completely bypassing the frozen macOS graphical interface. If you have an older, tray-loading drive, you can even command the tray to close itself:

drutil tray close

Step 3: Diagnosing the Drive’s Capabilities

If you buy a cheap, third-party external optical drive off the internet, it might claim to burn Blu-ray discs, but the Mac might refuse to cooperate. You can use the terminal to mathematically interrogate the drive’s firmware and see exactly what it is physically capable of doing.

drutil info

The terminal will output a massive list of technical specifications. Look for the “Write Strategies” section. It will explicitly list every single format the drive’s laser is mathematically capable of burning (e.g., CD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, BD-R).

If you see a format listed here, the drive is capable of it. If it is not listed, you have been scammed by the manufacturer, and no software on earth will make the drive burn that type of disc.

Step 4: Tracking the Burn Process

If you are burning a massive 50-gigabyte backup archive to a dual-layer Blu-ray disc using a graphical program like Disk Utility, and the progress bar seems to freeze at 99%, you might panic. Is the burn ruined, or is the graphical interface just lagging?

You can use the terminal to check the raw, physical status of the laser.

drutil status

The output will tell you exactly what the drive is doing at that exact millisecond. If the status says writing, the laser is still actively burning data, and you should not unplug the drive. If the status says idle, the burn process is mathematically finished, regardless of what the frozen graphical progress bar says.

By mastering the drutil command, you gain the ability to manage, diagnose, and rescue legacy optical hardware in a modern Mac environment.