CD burner compatable w/Toast 4.1.2

Martha:
Are you looking for a SCSI or IDE drive? My favorite SCSI is the Yamaha. I have a CRW8824S that works great. I'm certain Toast 4 supports it. Yamaha 8824s are available on eBay from time to time.

As I recall, another drive I used with Toast 4 was a Lite-On 52x drive (don't recall the model number).

Hi, Martha. Like Bill, I recommend getting an older Yamaha burner — SCSI, not USB. My old Yamaha CRW4416S (like Bill's but slower) is still going strong under OS 8.6, using Toast 3.5.7. Any later version of Toast also supports it. Yamaha made a fine line of SCSI burners that come up on Ebay pretty regularly.

Toast supports just about any scsi burner.You can see reports by other users for various brands of burners here :-
http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/search.drivedb.lasso
I have a HP9600se which has performed very well under Toast 4/OS8.6 on a 5500.

Toast supports just about any scsi burner.

This is true up to a point. Adaptec and now Roxio have always tried to have Toast support all burners that were available at the time any given version of Toast came out, but new burners come out all the time. When I bought my CRW4416S, I had to download a free update from Toast 3.5.6 (which was shipped with the burner but didn't support it) to 3.5.7. Many, if not most, burners that have appeared since Martha's version 4.1.2 of Toast was released would be unsupported by that version.

I have an IDE CD burner in my OS 9 G3 beige that I pulled out of a PC that was being tossed at work. It works with Toast 4. I'm not sure of the make (and am disinclined to pull apart my computer to have a look 🙂 ) but I think Toast is pretty flexible.

Kind of diverting from topic here but possibly relevant, there is a small privacy issue with Toast 4 that I am not sure if they changed with later versions. At least with OS 9 when you burn a CD it creates a copy of the Desktop File that is a copy of the one on your main computer, not just what you have on the CD. This file contains anything that may be present in the comments section of the "get info" for a file. This may be a note you included for yourself, or a web browser may include the URL of the site from which you downloaded a file. This is more a privacy rather than a security issue unless you personally enter a password into the comment section of a file. If you were to burn a CD and give it to somebody else (especially a PC user for whom the file is immediately apparent) then you should be aware that they may also be able to see information related to other files you have on your computer. They can't see the contents of the files (except the ones on the CD) but they can see a listing of the applications on your computer as well as a listing of the file names and related comments for files with comments on your computer.

If I am creating a CD to be shared then I use Apple's Disk Copy to create a disk image of the new CD contents. Copy the files to the image, then use the Disc Copy option in Toast to burn the new CD.

Toast and/or Apple System Profiler should tell you what make/model the drive is, unless it's some generic thing in which case it will probably say something like "CDRW".

"Toast and/or Apple System Profiler should tell you what make/model the drive is, unless it's some generic thing in which case it will probably say something like "CDRW"."

Thanks, that's what I got which was why I drew the line at dismantling the computer (which is the same one as I am using to compose the reply so that adds to the difficulty.) 🙂

Another vote of support for the Yamaha burners. I have both an internal (in one Mac) and an external Yamaha CRW4416SX (S for "scsi," X for "external") and use Toast 3.5.7. I've yet to burn a dud when I wasn't experimenting. Very reliable.

Limnos, I'm interested in your security related comment. Do you mean that if one uses the DiskImage method, this Desktop File issue isn't present?

Also, in general, what is the difference between creating the disk image CD and a non-disk image CD each containing the same information? I have assumed, maybe incorrectly, that if one created a disk image version AND wanted the CD to be a bootable CD with a copy of the MacOS on it, one couldn't use the disk image method. Is this correct?

Hi Martha,
I have a Panasonic CW-7502-B 4X Recorder/8X Reader.
I'm running Toast 4.2. I have SCSI connecting the Burner.
I using it on a Power Macintosh 7100/66 with 136 MB
of Ram. I'm running Mac 8.1 My writing Method on this one is, Disc at Once, Session at Once, Track at Once, Fixed/Variable, Packet Writing, Multi-Session. I bought the Burner up on
E Bay a couple of years ago and works real well. It burns
Data Discs, Picture Discs, Audio Dics, and I have a few Mac
Computer's so I have Disk Warrior on the orginal one I purchased
I have made copies so they are bootable and I can keep my
orginal like new. I know they have faster models now but
this model works just fine so I hope you can find one out
there that will work on your computer.

Hi Taerchen,

Check this link http://www.macintouch.com/desktopdb.html for a discussion about the desktop file inclusion. Basically if you use Toast 4 (I don't have a newer version) in OS 9 (maybe earlier too?) to burn a CD by simply selecting the files off your HD then the CD contains a copy of the HD's desktop file. This may include information for files on your HD that you are not burning to the CD (you can check the desktop file contents using a program like Desktop DB Diver [freeware, thanks]). If you make an image first, then use the Toast feature (I don't have Toast on the machine I'm using right now so I can't check the exact command) that essentially burns the volume of that image to the CD then the desktop file only contains the volume information which is for the files that end up on the CD.

I'm working from memory here and it's been a month or two since I last burned a CD, but if I recall correctly you specify something like "make a new disk" to make a CD bootable. I'm not sure if this is exclusive of the volume burning option that you need to use with an image.

The main concern is if you have stuff in your get info "comments" (MSIE puts URLs there), or application information that you prefer not to share.