[sminch]

i wasn't sure whether this would rate as an ibook question but none of the other forums seems appropriate and it is a problem i'm having with my ibook so here goes, and preemptive covering-my-back apologies to the moderators...

the problem is that a friend has given me a cd of photos, but it's not being recognised by my ibook (as in, my ibook doesn't show the cd on the desktop or finder, but it does show up in disk utility (and looks empty, as far as i can tell), and i can eject it with either f11 or the little 'eject' icon in finder). the drive seems to be working fine as it has no trouble with other disks.

i'm 99% sure that the cd was burned on a windows machine, but this shouldn't make any difference, should it? hell, i've used cds burned on my work computers on my ibook as recently as last week and that wasn't an issue.

so anyway, does anyone have any suggestions? is there any way to force my ibook to look again at the drive (eg., like if you click on the 'd:' icon on a pc)? is there anything i can do at all?

i can just look at the photos at work and maybe try burning another cd there, but this is a hassle and besides, i'd rather just have my laptop do what it's supposed to...

hope this is enough info for some helpful advice. in case it makes any difference i'm running 10.3.9 on a 1.2ghz ibook that's around four months old.

sminch

ps - just noticed that right clicking on the disk in disk utility and then selecting 'information' gives me this:

Name : Untitled 0
Type : Disk

Disk Identifier : disk2s0
Media Name : Untitled 0
Media Type : Generic
Connection Bus : ATAPI
IO Content : CD_ROM_Mode_1
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
CDROM : Yes
Optical Media Type : CD-R
Device Type : CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW
Location : External
Total Capacity : 702.8 MB (736,966,656 Bytes)
Disk Number : 2
Partition Number : 0

[ghporter]

There are a number of different disc formats that CDs can be burned with. I do not think your friend used one that your Mac recognizes.

Now I know that's painfully obvious, but my comment is not useless. Ask your friend what format his burner was set for. Then search the web for a widget that lets a Mac read it. Or tell your friend that he needs to use a standard format (ISO or Joliet are both recognized by OS X) so you can read the CD. Either way will work, but the latter will let your friend know that he needs to pay a little attention when trying to share stuff on CD. For what it's worth, just about all the PC burning software I know of makes it clear that some formats are better for reading discs on a variety of platforms, so it's pretty simple to do it right.

[D'Espice]

This looks to me as if your friend gave you the wrong CD, since it clearly says "Writeable: Yes". As far as I know, there is not a single CD media type burned on an x86 PC that the Mac can't read.

[tooki]

I think the answer is that the burn session wasn't "closed". Macs won't mount unclosed discs. This commonly happens with packet-burned discs on PCs.

tooki

[sminch]

cheers for your replies.

i've finally got the disk to work on one of my work pcs, though it didn't work at all on most of them and the one it did finally run on really wasn't happy about it and took ages to pick up the disk. still not sure what the issue was, but this friend is about as computer savvy as my cat so doubtless used the default settings (ie. little chance that it would be in a non-standard disk format) and then did something stoopid like forgetting to close the session. all good!

sminch

[kilmanjaro]

Originally Posted by tooki

I think the answer is that the burn session wasn't "closed". Macs won't mount unclosed discs. This commonly happens with packet-burned discs on PCs.

tooki

Waaaaaay back when (OS 8 days), I thought I remember having a program that would allow you to mount an "open" disk.

Edit: Come to think of it, I think it was actually for mounting different sessions on a multi-session disk so n/m.