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syniac

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 4, 2004
27
0
Europe
How does one get around Panther's restriction on CD burning size? At the moment it limits me to 660.7MB on a 700MB CD, which isn't useful, especially when I want to burn a 698 (or 702) MB file which can't be compressed any further with stuffit.
 
syniac said:
How does one get around Panther's restriction on CD burning size? At the moment it limits me to 660.7MB on a 700MB CD, which isn't useful, especially when I want to burn a 698 (or 702) MB file which can't be compressed any further with stuffit.

Your problem is not a limitation in Panther or any other OS. It's a problem with the labeling of CDs and DVDs. 700MB really means a formatted size of about 660MB and this will be the same on any computer. The problem is that a 1KB does not equal 1,000 Bytes. It's actually 1KB = 1,024 Bytes. This was not a big deal back when memory and disk space sizes were so small, but now that they are large, it adds up fast. Similarly, a 4.7GB DVD will only hold about 4.3GB in reality. The real problem, of course, is that the labelling standards are wrong. Any hard drive will have similar fine print. Why they don't clarify that for consumers is beyond me.

Your solution: burn that 700MB file onto a DVD-R/RW instead. It will hold several of them nicely.
 
This reminds me of some class action some group of people started against dell and apple and other computer companies for lieing about the hard drive sizes in their computers...even though on the bottom of the pages it says "actual formatted capacity less"......i wonder what ever happened with that class action?

This happened a few months back.
 
700MB really means a formatted size of about 660MB

Really? That does make sense of course (though by my calculation it should be nearer 684MB), but people do burn 'full' disks on other OSs (I only know Windows, but am told it worked on Mac OS 9 as well).

Krimson, are you really using 800MB CDs? (Those would be one thing I have never seen in the shops.)

I seem to remember something about the drives used in Macs under Panther having a limit to prevent the laser having to track too far to the centre of the disc (or something), including when reading the disc - this being a limitation in the firmware of ?the Mac ?the drive. It gets discussed occasionally, but there always seems to be someone it doesn't apply to.

So, opinions on whether it's worth trying Toast?

(And yes, I wish I had a superdrive.)
 
syniac said:
Really? That does make sense of course (though by my calculation it should be nearer 684MB), but people do burn 'full' disks on other OSs (I only know Windows, but am told it worked on Mac OS 9 as well).

Krimson, are you really using 800MB CDs? (Those would be one thing I have never seen in the shops.)

I seem to remember something about the drives used in Macs under Panther having a limit to prevent the laser having to track too far to the centre of the disc (or something), including when reading the disc - this being a limitation in the firmware of ?the Mac ?the drive. It gets discussed occasionally, but there always seems to be someone it doesn't apply to.

So, opinions on whether it's worth trying Toast?

(And yes, I wish I had a superdrive.)

Lets put it this way, if its around 684 and there are some bad sections of the cd (yes this is possible...just like hd's) then there will probly be less usable space.
 
it depends from the looks of it Panther is not allowing you to do any over burning. In nero and rioxo (yes I know it for a PC) I taken 700 meg cds across 3 diffence brands and I have burned 700-705megs. Problem is when you starting getting up there around 700 megs the chances of making a coaster increase greatly and I have made sevearl of them when I got to that ranges in the CD.
 
It is a limit in the Finder, and while there are 800 MB CD's (as well as 1.3 GB CD's, but those need a drive firmware update usually), they're not common. Burning via any program other than the Finder will allow you to use the full 700 MB available (though depending on the brand it may go up to 705 MB (Memorex does 702.1 MB), IIRC you need Toast to use those last few MB). The easiest way to do it is put everything you need to burn in one folder, open disk utility and create a new image from that folder (set type to CD/DVD master), and burn that.
 
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