If you put a blank CD in your Mac, you can drag files onto it, eject it, let it burn, and get a nice cross-platform ISO9660 CD out the other end. Do the same with a blank DVD and you get a Mac-only HFS+ DVD. There is apparently no way to make a cross-platform data DVD from the Finder. Of course, Apple doesn’t tell you this – doesn’t even mention it in their Knowledge Base. You just waste a bunch of money on $5 blank DVDs, thinking something else must have gone wrong, since you’ve never made a coaster with this technique before.
The solution turns out to be Toast. Hooey.
—
Music: The Ethiopians :: Hong Kong Flu
It is lame that Apple made the Finder burn
DVDs in a Mac-only fashion while CDs come
out PC-friendly, especially when so much
about MacOS X is cross-platform friendly,
but then again, it’s lame that PCs can’t
read Mac-formatted disks without third party
software being installed on them, n’est-ce pas?
Just did a bit of searching on Apple’s website
and found this:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?13@132.17TGaWEfdKk.4@.3bb7d05d/2
in a post by Gerrit DeWitt:
“You can create a DVD with data that can be read
on multiple operating systems.
Use Disk Copy (/Applications/Utilities/) to create a
new disk image file (.dmg file) whose size is 4.7 GB.
This is a preset size in the save dialog.
Format the disk image using the Universal Disk
Format (UDF) filesystem. The disc will NOT be a
hybrid (one volume made available via more than
one file system), but it will be legible by multiple
platforms.
Copy the data to the disk image, then use Disk
Copy’s Burn Image command to burn the contents
to a blank DVD-R disc. ”
Looking at options in Disk Copy, you can also
format a DVD-R sized disk image as “MS-DOS
File System format” in addition to UFS, HFS or
HFS+. Not as simple as using the Finder, but
at least you don’t have to buy Toast Deluxe.
Kiss a baby for me will ya?
What a brilliant suggestion – and very elegant. Thanks for the research, pal! I’ll have to give this a shot (although we did end up purchasing Toast, which is a very nice app).
Should consider posting this to macosxhints.com as well.
You rock.
Personally, I’m so used to using
Toast Deluxe (for years) that I burn
all my media with it regardless of other
options. My awareness of Disk Copy
has been expanded considerably in the
last couple of days, though, thru the
post I quoted from Apple’s Discussions
and thru a class on MacOS X trouble-
shooting I just finished here in NYC,
conducted by the inimitable Ted Landau
of macfixit.com fame.
BTW, you, of course, rock too; like father,
like son, I suppose.