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CD-Rs Won't Boot/Open

LCARS

Well-known member
I'm having trouble booting from burnt CD-Rs. In past years, I burnt OS 9 CD-Rs (same media stock) with no issues but with 7.5.5 and 8.6, I cannot get the computer to boot from them. Even stranger is when the disc mounts, it can't open the installer. I think I might be forgetting a step?

Burnt programs are fine.

Burning from a MDD with 10.5 to use with a 1400c & Duo 2300c/Dock II. Using ISO files from Macintosh Garden & Macintosh Repository. Burning the disk as ISO, even tried burning from Disk Utility in 10.5. No luck with either effort. I have also dragged the image to a PCMCIA card and popped it into my 1400c. It couldn't open it that way, either.

So I can't imagine that the 3 different images are all bad. I've been experimenting but I don't like this plastic waste. Any direction is appreciated : )
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
I think Toast has the option to make sure the CD System Folder is blessed and bootable on classic machines.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
A number of the "bootable" CD images on Macintosh Garden are not in fact bootable; they are only images of the HFS+ partition, and don't have the driver partition at the start that makes it work. I hit this with at least two of the images on MG, but I can't totally remember which ones.

(Note, you can't test them with SheepShaver; that will boot cheerfully off them because it has a built-in driver for bare HD partition images, or something)
 

LCARS

Well-known member
Good point, @cheesestraws I remember reading about such an issue many years ago. Is there an installation alternative using these images? I wasn't able to get the 1400c to open it from a PCMCIA card but perhaps via a network? I haven't been able to get my Apple external scsi enclosure to play nicely with SCSI2SD yet.
 

joshc

Well-known member
It should also be noted, you don't *have* to be booted from an install disk to install from it. You can boot from something else, say an external hard drive, or a boot floppy, and then insert the CD and install from it.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
Oh, sorry, yes, I meant to reply to this. Honestly in your position I'd be swearing and trying to boot off something else. The Installer is just a normal application.
 

jessenator

Well-known member
Another tip of you manage to get a bootable image: burn the CD as close to 1x as you can. I know it's slow, but I've had the best success with that.

For some reason, and I'm not hip enough to say why (might be in the documentation), certain CD-R media I've used show some of Toast's write speeds italicized. And not knowing what that meant, I select the lowest number that isn't. This is when you insert the blank discs before you click the button start the burn process—which I didn't do for most of my CD/DVD recording days in University.

I've stuck to mostly images for the desktop models, as I have no portables, but as @cheesestraws said, there are incorrectly-imaged ...images on Macintosh Garden.
 
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