There was a similar issue with older Macbook (and Powerbook) laptops, where certain drives would occasionally refuse to eject a disk. The solution at the time was to insert a piece of folded-up paper into the slot, jamming the disk in place. When you booted the machine, the drive would try to spin the disk up, fail, and then eject it. The timing was hard, since you had to get your makeshift paper jam out of the way as well.
