Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Disks

Floppy drives disappeared from Macs beginning in 1997—and these days, they’re absent from most Windows PCs, too.

In the meantime, there are all kinds of other disks you can connect to a Mac these days: CDs and DVDs, hard drives, iPods, USB flash drives, and so on.

When you insert a disk, its icon may show up in any of three places (depending on your Finder preferences): on the right side of the desktop, in the Computer window, and in the Sidebar. To see what’s on a disk you’ve inserted, double-click its icon.

Tip

You can make the Mac work like Windows, if you choose. For example, to open a single window containing icons of all currently inserted disks, choose Go→Computer (which produces the rough equivalent of the My Computer window).

To save you that step, though, you can tell OS X to put disk icons on the desktop, too. Just choose Finder→Preferences, click General, and turn on the top checkboxes—“Hard disks,” “External disks,” and “CDs, DVDs, and iPods.”

To remove a disk from your Mac, use one of these methods:

• Hold down the key on your keyboard. Mac keyboards, both on laptops and desktops, have a special Eject key (), usually in the upper-right corner. Hold it down for a moment to make a CD or DVD pop out. (If you don’t have an key, hold down F12 instead.)

• Drag its icon onto the ...