Using PC CD-ROM discs with classic Mac

[bigmessowires]

It's been a long while, and I've forgotten - should I expect to be able to mount generic PC CD-ROM discs with a classic Mac, running System 7.5.0? Do I need some extra extension or something?

I recently picked up an external Plextor 12x SCSI CD-ROM. Attached to my PowerMac 7100, it shows up fine on the SCSI bus. Some of my SCSI tools can even correctly report the capacity of the inserted disc, and do raw block reads from the disc. But no volumes ever get mounted on the Mac desktop. I tried a "hybrid" CD from 1998, a Photo CD, and some plain PC CDs, but none of them mounted anything. SCSI tools say there are no Macintosh volumes on the disc. Unfortunately I don't have any other classic Mac CD media to test with.

 

[Blinkenlightz]

If I recall correctly, the "CD Sunrise" extension added generic CD-ROM drive support.

 

[Paralel]

I've had no trouble creating and burning ISO9660 format CDs on my PC and my Classic II and my PB540c both read them no problem.

Do you have all the relevant CD software installed? (Foreign File Access Extension, ISO9600 Extension, etc...?) If not, that is your problem. and why it can't see any CDs.

 

[bigmessowires]

Yes, both of those extensions are present in the System/Extensions folder. It's vanilla 7.5.0 install that I just made a couple of days ago, including all the default options except the printer drivers.

 

[bigmessowires]

I think maybe my problem is that there's no driver for the CD-ROM drive? I don't really understand how this is supposed to work. Obviously the SCSI utilities can see and access the drive and its media, but maybe that's using low-level SCSI routines, and there's some higher-level driver software necessary to use this as a Mac filesystem?

Two clues that make me suspect this:

- In Lido 7, it sees the CD-ROM drive, but when I click on it in the SCSI list, Lido just beeps and doesn't let me do anything.

- In the PC Exchange control panel, if I click Options, a dialog appears with a list of all the SCSI devices. Below the list it says "SCSI drivers will be loaded for the devices checked above". My hard drive is listed in a normal font, and I can check/uncheck it with the mouse. But the Plextor CD-ROM is listed in italics, and can't be checked.

 

[bigmessowires]

Installed CD Sunrise. Now I can mount the Hybrid CD, hooray! But when I insert a PC-type CD (is this ISO9660?), it says the disk is unreadable and offers to format it. In the Extensions folder I have Foreign File Access, High Sierra File Access, and ISO 9660 File Access. Is there something else I could be missing?

 

[Blinkenlightz]

Is the drive selectable now in the PC Exchange control panel?

 

[classic]

Maybe joliet?:

http://www.tempel.org/joliet/

 

[bigmessowires]

It's the same news as before in the PC Exchange control panel. But I was able to mount a hybrid (Mac and PC) CD and copy the files off it, so that's great! But I noticed this in the CD Sunrise documentation: "CD-Sunrise doesn't support music CD and ISO format. "

As near as I can tell, then, this Plextor CD drive isn't natively supported by System 7.1 or System 7.5 (tried both), and CD Sunrise only supports Mac-format CDs. That's better than nothing, and for $10 I can't complain too much. Maybe this drive was never intended to work with the Mac anyway - it looks more like something you'd see with a Sun workstation. Maybe there's some other driver or extension that would fix everything, but unfortunately I'm guessing not.

 

[bigmessowires]

Aha! Apple's Universal CD ROM Driver 5.3.1 from Mac Driver Museum does the trick under System 7.5! It doesn't seem to work under 7.1, though. Their notes say it was released with System 7.6, so maybe 7.1 is too much older for the extension to work correctly. That's good enough for me to declare success: works on one machine, half-works on the other machine.

 

[Blinkenlightz]

Excellent! Probably a more feature-complete driver than CD Sunrise too.

Glad it worked out!

 

[bigmessowires]

Thanks! And I'm an idiot - the Apple universal driver didn't work on System 7.1 because I put it at the root of the hard drive, instead of in the Extensions folder. :I When moved to the right location, it works nicely.

 

[Paralel]

If you have a copy of 8.1 sitting around, yank the drivers off of that. It will give you the universal CD driver 5.4.2, and all the other necessary extensions updated to 5.2. They all work just fine with 7.1.x. I have verified it 1st hand.

 

[NJRoadfan]

The universal driver worked on System 7.0.1 and 7.1 for me. To read generic ISO9660 High Sierra discs you need the extra translator extensions. Apple's CD-ROM driver 5.3.2 installer has them. Just run the install and then recopy the older universal driver back into the Extensions folder afterwards.

http://www.macdrivermuseum.net/disk.shtml

 

[Bunsen]

Is there some reason that you need to run 7.5.0 specifically? Generally, any .0 release in classic Mac OS is a bad idea, and 7.5.anything was a bit of a trainwreck on PPC, in my experience. 7.6.1 or 8.1 were both much more stable.

 

[bigmessowires]

I thought (incorrectly) that I needed to install 7.5.0 before I could install the .x update patch.