Who’d a thunk that creating a custom hybrid CD is still so difficult in this day and age? Does nobody do it anymore? We’re getting ready to do a limited release of InqScribe 1.5 on CDs and wanted to create a cross platform CD that would:
The Custom Hybrid format is the way to go: If you’re a Mac user, you see a Mac disk, if you’re a Windows user, you see a Windows disk. But apparently, this is now a relatively rare thing to do as it’s essentially hidden in Roxio Toast 7, one of the more popular CD-burning applications on the Mac. And man, was it painful!
After running into a slew of problems, a quick google search turned up a page by our very own friend/company/developer (and 9rules rising star): David Seah. He has a most excellent tutorial of how to create a Custom Hybrid CD-ROM.
Some other useful sources of tips:
Roxio has an article on How to AutoStart.
TidBits recently had an article on this topic called Burning Down the Disc by Adam Engst.
The key things that I missed in my process:…
The windows application referenced in the autorun.inf’s open= line can’t have spaces. e.g. “open=Install InqScribe 1.5.exe” is not valid, but “open=InstallInqScribe.exe” is fine. (Dave)
When testing your autorun.inf in Windows, if the CD doesn’t seem to autorun, right-click on the CD and select “AutoPlay”. I’ve noticed that the disk often wouldn’t autoplay if I had a file browser open with the disk visible. (Me)
Use the “bless” command to set the CD-ROM to automatically open up a Finder window in Mac OS X, e.g. “sudo bless -folder /Volumes/InqScribe/ -openfolder /Volumes/InqScribe/”. (Adam)
The background disk image needs to be copied to the CD itself, or it won’t show up. I had thought that a copy would be made automatically when you use the Finder’s Show View Options to set the picture, but that just sets a reference. (Dave)
It was cleanest with each new attempt to start with a NEW disk image created by Apple’s Disk Utility. Otherwise, Mysterious Things happen with your disk image. (Me)
Set the “Format:” of your disk image to “sparse disk image” in Disk Utility to save space. Otherwise, each disk image is 650MB. (Adam)
Burn CD-RWs while testing. Sure it’s slower, but I now have so many frisbees that even my 2 year old has lost interest. (Dave)
Once you have your image, you can save it as a .iso disk image for easy duplication later. Opening and burning the .iso image onto a CD on my Windows XP box worked fine, retaining the image’s Custom Hybrid character. (Me)
posted April 04, 2006 by ben
Add comment: