OS X 10.6 can't mount DVD-Rs adhering to ISO 9660 (1999) ?!

Hi

I recently bought a Mac and realized, to my horror, that it can't
mount any of my data DVD-Rs, which were recorded using the ISO
9660:1999 format standard.

Indeed, the Wikipedia seems to suggest that OS X does not support the
format:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_966...system_support

Is there any other way to mount the disks besides using a different
OS? My searching the web turned up nothing usable.

In article
<ca878f1e-8268-49c4-b524->,
Alex Miller <> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I recently bought a Mac and realized, to my horror, that it can't
> mount any of my data DVD-Rs, which were recorded using the ISO
> 9660:1999 format standard.
>
> Indeed, the Wikipedia seems to suggest that OS X does not support the
> format:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_966...system_support
>
> Is there any other way to mount the disks besides using a different
> OS? My searching the web turned up nothing usable.

Yeah, you're screwed. MacOS 10.6 totally removed all support for ISO
9660 from the OS. Guess you'll have to switch back to a PC. If you
can't read your DVD-Rs, you really have no other choice but to run
Windows for the rest of your life. In fact, like the Publisher's
Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, death will not release you. You'll be
running Windows for all eternity.

Did you just check Wikipedia or did you bring in an old disk to an Apple
Store to see if you could read them before you bought a Mac? Have you
tried running Windows on the Macintosh via BootCamp to see if that
worked? Or try installing Parallels or Fusion to see if you can read
them using a Virtualized version of Windows?

Just some thoughts before you threw out the baby with the bathwater...

--
DeeDee, don't press that button! DeeDee! NO! Dee...
[I filter all Goggle Groups posts, so any reply may be automatically by ignored]

Alex Miller wrote:

> Indeed, the Wikipedia seems to suggest that OS X does not support the
> format:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_966...system_support

No, what it suggests is that no one bothered to update it when Snow Leopard
came out. AFAIK, it wasn't even correct, ISO9660 support was always in
MacOS X from 10.0 onward. In fact, I have been reading ISO 9660 CD's using
a Mac since 1991.

The 1999 extensions add support for longer file names, etc, but the old format
file names are also present for backwards compatiblity.


> Is there any other way to mount the disks besides using a different
> OS? My searching the web turned up nothing usable.

More likely, your disks are not readable in the new drive due to a media
incompatbility. Try reading them in another drive.

Note that there are some limitations to the ISO9660 format, such as a maximum
file size of 2g.

There also may be problems if you did not close the sessions on the disk,
i.e. left them open for further writing, or have more than one session
on the disk.

I've never used either, so I don't know how MacOS will handle them.

Try borrowing or buying a cheap external drive and see if that works.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM

On Nov 2, 12:19*am, "Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <g...@mendelson.com>
wrote:

> More likely, your disks are not readable in the new drive due to a media
> incompatbility. Try reading them in another drive.

Nope. I can use "dd" to extract the raw *.iso, but I can't mount.

>
> Note that there are some limitations to the ISO9660 format, such as a maximum
> file size of 2g.

Indeed, file size might be a factor. I'm having difficulty with DVD-Rs
containing a single 4.3GB file, but could read one that contains a
2.4GB file. Perhaps the limit is closer to 4GB?

FWIW, I used the following under Linux to prepare the disk images:

mkisofs -allow-limited-size -gui -iso-level 4 -J -joliet-long -r
some_files > foo.iso

In article <ca878f1e-8268-49c4-b524->,
Alex Miller <> wrote:

>I recently bought a Mac and realized, to my horror, that it can't
>mount any of my data DVD-Rs, which were recorded using the ISO
>9660:1999 format standard.

Which program did you use to master the filesystem on the DVDs and what
did you use to write these DVDs?


>Indeed, the Wikipedia seems to suggest that OS X does not support the
>format:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_966...system_support

Wikipedia (as many times) may not be right.

>Is there any other way to mount the disks besides using a different
>OS? My searching the web turned up nothing usable.

Optical media usually contains a "hybrid filesystem" that supports several
filesystems. What you may do depends on how the media was created.



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(uni)
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URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

In article <vilain->,
Michael Vilain <> wrote:

>Yeah, you're screwed. MacOS 10.6 totally removed all support for ISO
>9660 from the OS. Guess you'll have to switch back to a PC. If you
>can't read your DVD-Rs, you really have no other choice but to run
>Windows for the rest of your life. In fact, like the Publisher's
>Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, death will not release you. You'll be
>running Windows for all eternity.

Are you serious?

I know that on Darwin 9.0 (Leopard) ISO-9660 works (but there is a Apple
program called "hdiutil" that creates ISO-9660 images with completely broken
pseudo Rock Ridge extensions**). Why should Apple remove support for ISO-9660
and tus disallow to use CD-ROMs?

**) Because of the broken RR extensions, many CDs/DVDs created on Mac OS X
cannot be mounted on Linux.

I personally did not yet get any notes about Apple dropping support for
ISO-9660.

--
EMail: (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
(uni)
(work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

In article <>,
Geoffrey S. Mendelson <> wrote:

>More likely, your disks are not readable in the new drive due to a media
>incompatbility. Try reading them in another drive.

This would be easy to prove:

1) Get a recent cdrtools version from:
ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/

2) Compile and install

3) Become root, eject the optical media and then call "ps -ef"

- remember the Process ID of the program called:
/usr/sbin/diskarbitrationd, e.g.:

0 33194 1 0 0:00.68 ?? 0:01.62 /usr/sbin/diskarbitrationd

- Now type kill -STOP 33194 (use the apropriate process
ID that matches your ps output)

4) insert the media

5) call readcd f=/dev/null

6) See whether the whole media is readable

7) call kill -CONT 33194 (use the apropriate process
ID that matches your ps output)

Note that cdrtools is the first CD/DVD writing suite available for Mac OS X
(ported to Rhapsody in January 1998 and ported to Darwin in October 2001).


>Note that there are some limitations to the ISO9660 format, such as a maximum
>file size of 2g.

You did use the wrong sources to get this information ;-)

All numbers (except for the byte that holds GMT time offset) on ISO-9660
are unsigned numbers. For this reason, the max filesize on ISO-9660 in
level 1-2 if 4 GB - 2k which is 4294965247 Bytes. Staring with ISO-9660
level 3, the standard allows any file size (up to the size of the complete
media). With today's typical logical "sector size" of 2048 bytes (DVDs
really have 32 kB sectors and BluRays really have 64 kB sectors), the
maximum media size with ISO-9660 is 8 TB.

Note that in order to have files > 4294965247 Bytes on ISO-9660, you need
to use "multi extent" files. This means that you need to use a "multi extent"
aware program for mastering the ISO filesystem _and_ a "multi extent" aware
OS to mount the resulting media.

The most popular program for mastering ISO-9660 is "mkisofs" and mkisofs
supports "multi extent" files since July 2007. Mkisofs is part of the
cdrtools suite:

ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/

You just need to use mkisofs -iso-level 3 or more for mastering the filesystem.


--
EMail: (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
(uni)
(work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

In article <67004926-b385-4ed3-b16a->,
Alex Miller <> wrote:

>Indeed, file size might be a factor. I'm having difficulty with DVD-Rs
>containing a single 4.3GB file, but could read one that contains a
>2.4GB file. Perhaps the limit is closer to 4GB?

If you use ISO-9660 level 3 or higher, there is no file size limit.

>FWIW, I used the following under Linux to prepare the disk images:
>
>mkisofs -allow-limited-size -gui -iso-level 4 -J -joliet-long -r
>some_files > foo.iso

You are not using mkisofs but a broken and unmaintained fork from a 5 year old
version of the original software.

Mkisofs never hat an option called "-allow-limited-size" and there is not need
for such an option as mkisofs correclty supports large files.

If you have problems to use the filesystems created with the broken fork,
you should not be amazed that you cannot use the resulting media. There is
a big chance that your problem is a result from one of many well known bugs
in this fork called "genisoimage". I recommend you to get the real software
from here:

ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/

BTW: Since Spring 2007, mkisofs did largely extent UDF support and now
allows you to add Apple UDF extensions. This allows to have Apple extensions
on the medium without the need for creating a hybrid disk with the antique HFS
that does not even support large files >= 2 GB.


--
EMail: (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
(uni)
(work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

On Nov 2, 2:14*pm, j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (Joerg Schilling) wrote:
> In article <67004926-b385-4ed3-b16a-163ef761a...@y10g2000prg.googlegroups..com>,
> Alex Miller *<alex.etc.mil...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Indeed, file size might be a factor. I'm having difficulty with DVD-Rs
> >containing a single 4.3GB file, but could read one that contains a
> >2.4GB file. Perhaps the limit is closer to 4GB?
>
> If you use ISO-9660 level 3 or higher, there is no file size limit.
>
> >FWIW, I used the following under Linux to prepare the disk images:
>
> >mkisofs -allow-limited-size -gui -iso-level 4 -J -joliet-long -r
> >some_files > foo.iso
>
> You are not using mkisofs but a broken and unmaintained fork from a 5 year old
> version of the original software.
>
> Mkisofs never hat an option called "-allow-limited-size" and there is notneed
> for such an option as mkisofs correclty supports large files.
>
> If you have problems to use the filesystems created with the broken fork,
> you should not be amazed that you cannot use the resulting media. There is
> a big chance that your problem is a result from one of many well known bugs
> in this fork called "genisoimage". I recommend you to get the real software
> from here:
>
> ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/
>
> BTW: Since Spring 2007, mkisofs did largely extent UDF support and now
> allows you to add Apple UDF extensions. This allows to have Apple extensions
> on the medium without the need for creating a hybrid disk with the antique HFS
> that does not even support large files >= 2 GB.

Wow. I did not expect an answer from the author of mkisofs et. al. !

Debian/Ubuntu screwed up again?! I'll be more careful when burning new
DVDs in the future.

Is there anything I can do to read 4+ GB files from the DVDs already
burned though, on this damn MacBook Pro?

In article <c1f9aa1d-0595-40ad-9afe->,
Alex Miller <> wrote:
>On Nov 2, 2:14=A0pm, j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (Joerg Schilling) wrote:

>> >FWIW, I used the following under Linux to prepare the disk images:
>>
>> >mkisofs -allow-limited-size -gui -iso-level 4 -J -joliet-long -r
>> >some_files > foo.iso
>>
>> You are not using mkisofs but a broken and unmaintained fork from a 5 yea=
>r old
>> version of the original software.

>Wow. I did not expect an answer from the author of mkisofs et. al. !
>
>Debian/Ubuntu screwed up again?! I'll be more careful when burning new
>DVDs in the future.
>
>Is there anything I can do to read 4+ GB files from the DVDs already
>burned though, on this damn MacBook Pro?


If you really used exactly the command line you mentioned, these files
are not on the medium, they never have been added to the filesystem.

--
EMail: (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
(uni)
(work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily