pc to mac cdrom sharing

December 3, 2006 8:01 AM

How do I mount a Windows 98-burned CDROM in OS X?

Old archival CDRs burned on a PC running Windows 98 don't mount on my OS X (10.3.9) iBook. Is there shareware? How can I get my files? Thanks in advance.

posted by valkane to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

What program burned these CDs? (E.g., Nero.) What type of CD did you burn? (E.g., ISO-9660) What file system format settings did you use? (E.g., FAT32.)
posted by secret about box at 8:26 AM on December 3, 2006

Response by poster: Disk Utility (10.4.4) says the disk is a SONY CD-RW CRX800E Media. But it doesn't allow me to mount the disk.

I'm afraid I don't remember what the burner app was or what format it used.

here's the Disk Utility rundown:

r : disk1
Media Name : SONY CD-RW CRX800E Media
Media Type : CD-ROM
Connection Bus : ATAPI
Connection ID : Device 1
IO Content : CD_partition_scheme
Device Tree : mac-io/ata-4@1f000/@1:0
Locked : Yes
Writable : No
Ejectable : Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
CDROM : Yes
Optical Media Type : CD-R
Device Type : CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW
Location : Internal
Total Capacity : 807.2 MB (846,367,200 Bytes)
Disk Number : 1
Partition Number : 0
posted by valkane at 8:47 AM on December 3, 2006

Yeah, I didn't think that you probably wouldn't remember that stuff. Duh. "My bad" as the kids say.

Have you been able to try the disc in a different computer? (Another Mac or a Windows machine.)
posted by secret about box at 9:08 AM on December 3, 2006

Ditto Mikey-San on trying the disc in another PC or Mac. I've never run across a Windows-burned CD that wouldn't mount on a Mac. This one's an oddity.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:09 AM on December 3, 2006

since you say "Windows 98" i'd bet they're pretty old - while I personally have some CDs from that era that read OK, they don't last forever, and your discs may have gone bad. test it out on another computer. also, Disk Utility should have given you a list of sessions under the drive itself, which you may be able to mount by clicking on and selecting Mount. (it's a toolbar button in 10.4, forget about 10.3.) if you did some weird multisession thing then you might want to check versiontracker for a program to deal with that, though sometimes the programs that do multisession aren't necessarily compatible with anything but themselves.
posted by mrg at 11:03 AM on December 3, 2006

I ran into this when I had Win '98 and the kid had a Mac. All of this is SWAG, but back then, the burner usually came with SW. Some bought Nero, but it could have been burned with some goofball SW. My best guess, you're going to have to copy it to a Windows box, and then burn it back to an ISO 9660 format CD (or something Mac-related, sorry, not familiar). The default back then was to format it in Windows, and most people didn't know about 9660, or how to change it in the SW.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 1:01 PM on December 3, 2006

Response by poster: Okay, I know that Joliet would let me mount these disks under OS 9, but I grabbed a copy of that off versiontracker, and it doesn't work now.

I appreciate mrg's suggestion, but I don't think these disks are "bad." There's too many of them. I'm thinking hippies right, and I'm gonna have to scare up a PC to do a backward run-through.

Thanks to everyone for their help.
posted by valkane at 1:39 PM on December 3, 2006

Mac OS X has built-in support for the Joliet extensions to the ISO 9660 file system.

What do you get when you enter the following into your command line (when the CD is inserted)?:

hdiutil pmap /dev/rdisk1

You should see something like the following (I've used rdisk2 since my optical drive is located at a different drive ID than yours):

~ $ hdiutil pmap /dev/rdisk2
Partition List
## Dev_______ Type_______________ Name_____________ Start___ Size____ End_____
-1 disk2      Apple_ISO           TDF_1-3                  0  6242432  6242431  
...

posted by RichardP at 8:44 PM on December 3, 2006