[crazeinc]

I never thought I'd need a superdrive, but alas. I have 50 CD's in HFS format that I need to burn into ISO 9660. This is a sucky process, but I have about 20 of the CD's copied to my harddrive and am trying to burn them again, but it keeps telling me the data I took off of the CD is too big to burn. I'm using 700mb CD's and the data is only 630mb so what's the deal?

[crazeinc]

Actually, as long as I'm asking questions. Is there a way I can cram a bunch of this data together so I don't need to waste 50 CD's?

[Gavin]

Try using toast or
missing media burner http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/ <- free

they let you use the full capacity of the CD


You could use gzip or bzip2 to compress your data in the terminal - it's not hard at all. bzip2 compresses better but takes longer.

Copy the files from a CD into a folder called my_folder in parent_folder, do this in the terminal:

1. change into the parent folder
cd /path/to/parent_folder

2. bundle the folder up into a single archive file
tar -cf archive.tar my_folder

3. compress the file
bzip2 archive.tar

you should end up with a file called archive.tar.bz2 in the parent folder.
repeat with all CDs.
burn archive files to disk.

This works on the individual files and not a disk image. Files like images and video are usually already compressed, but if you have mostly text files then you can squish the hell out of them.

I've seen a 2 GB log file compressed to 100MB with bzip2