Doug Wyatt's Musings - The CD that wouldn't mount

2004 > July

The CD that wouldn't mount ::

For the benefit of anyone else with a CD burned on Mac OS X and which doesn’t show up on the desktop, here’s something to try.

Last November I burned a CD of some audio tracks and deleted them from my hard drive. A opportunity to use some of the tracks came up, so I pulled out the CD and popped it in. It didn’t show up on the desktop, and I didn’t get any error messages. After poking around, I found some clues in the console log that suggested that the media was fine.

Indeed, I was able to use Disk Utility to make a disk image of the CD without errors. I unsuccessfuly tried to mount the disk image, and got the same error messages in the console—because I’d made the disk image read-only. If it happens again, I’ll try making a writable disk image.

But I was able to mount the image from the command line:

$ hdiutil attach ~/Desktop/ProblemDiskImage.dmg -shadow /tmp/shadowfile

This allows mounting a read-only disk image in a way that writes are permitted—they get redirected to the shadow file.

The disk image mounted and I copied the files to my hard drive.

Fri, 2 Jul 2004, 9:41 PM PDT

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