Somebody gave me a CD ROM with lots of files (WAV etc) from their PC. However my mac (O 9.1) does not recognise the CD and wants to reinitialise it. What is odd is that I have virtual PC (W95) on the same machine that reads it OK so it must be a software problem. Is there any mac software that will allow me to read a PC CD ROM? I don’t want to go through VPC every time, or reburn every CD he gives me.
thanks
Go to
http://www.tempel.org/joliet
They have an extension that should help.
thanks, will try it out
OK Opposite direction.
I obtained some avis on my PC. It plays fine but I wanted to store it on CD. The only computer that has a burner is a Mac and for some reason it plays well on the original PC that I downloaded it with but when I go to an XP computer it says the CD has some strange files it cant read or that the CD was corrupted. How do I read a Mac Burnt PC file on any PC?
some of the products mentioned on http://www.macwindows.com/disks2.html
may help
A CD burned on a PC in ISO 9660 format should be immediately accessible on any Mac.
A CD burned on a PC in ISO 9660 format using Joliet extensions (in other words, long file names) should be accessible on a Mac except under MacOS 7/8/9 it may show truncated file names in all caps, a problem which can be fixed by downloading the freeware Joliet format extension for Macintosh. I’m pretty sure you don’t need it under MacOS X.
A CD burned on a PC using proprietary formats that let you add files to an already-burned CD (multi-session CD) or which let you drag and drop files onto the CD as if it were a hard drive may or may not be accessible on a Macintosh. Most of the software that lets you use CDs in that fashion will let you “save” or convert the CDs to ISO 9660.
A CD burned on a Mac using ISO 9660 format should be transparently available to a PC.
A CD burned on a Mac using Toast formats such as “files and folders” or “Macintosh Volume” are actually in HFS format like a Macintosh hard drive, and will be inaccessible on a PC unless the PC is equipped with software such as MacDrive which lets the PC access HFS volumes.
A CD burned on a Mac in the correct format may contain files with characters that are illegal on a PC ("", for instance) and this may cause problems trying to read the CD on the PC.
A CD burned on the Mac with iTunes or by dragging files to the CD (using built-in Apple software that lets you treat CDs like hard drives) may cause problems on the PC; but, as with PC CD burning programs that let you do this, you can “save” or convert the CD to a standard format. In the later versions of Toast (Toast Titanium), the format called “Hybrid” should be readable on a PC (and is, I think, a variant on ISO 9660).
Older PC formats such as High Sierra can be read on a Mac without additional help.
Rewritable CDs are always a mixed bag as far as reading them on other computers / other operating systems / other drives once they’ve been erased and reburnt.
thanks for the excellent reply Ahunter3. Joliet did indeed solve the problem, thanks seal-hunter. I don’t know why my mac didn’t originally read something on the disk, I can only imagine he used a strange format to burn it - I noticed he added some files to it after he originally burnt it (being R/W) .