AnalogClock






Saturday, January 17, 2009

How to Mount an Old CDROM Disk on Mac OS X

I had a little trouble with a really old PCPlus DVD on my Mac OS X Mac Book Pro. I wanted to try to install some old Windows 95/98 compilers and software using Wine so I could do some Wine compatible Windows development on the cheap. The old PCPlus DVD had a complete copy of Borland C++ Builder and Delphi and an old copy of IE4 and IE5 among other oldies that are hard to find without massive trojan infestations on the net these days. These ancient versions are often the perfect solution to the problem of finding software that works on Wine and doesn't have an onerous disk space and .net requirement.

The problem is I can't see all the files on the DVD. I've seen this problem before and known that it has something to do with the Joliet File System extension. Luckily there is a quick fix. A quick check of the man page for mount and then mount_cd9660 shows that the -r and -j options to mount_cd9660 allow the mounting of ISO 9660 file systems while ignoring the Rock Ridge and Joliet specific extensions.

umount /dev/disk1
mkdir ~/DISK_LABEL
/sbin/mount_cd9660 -r -j /dev/disk1 ~/DISK_LABEL

And voila! All the files are there and all the files are mapped to uppercase. No sudo is required with this method.

Friday, January 2, 2009

The Story of Stuff

This is a must see. It connects all the dots in the global economy. I saw this video over a year ago on Terra Nova. It is now an approachable interactive evolving educational website.