CD/DVD Burn fail

I am wondering if there is something in common in your process or that you have installed that potentially interferes with the DVD burning? I have been burning DVD's for my daughter's small business frequently lately and have been using the following Macs and OS's:

2008 iMac 10.11 (El Capitan) built in DVD burner

2010 Macbook Air 10.13 (High Sierra) external Superdrive

2017 Macbook Pro 10.14 (Mojave) external Superdrive

The Superdrive requires a higher power port and this can be important. This seems to work best when nothing else is connected via USB, a simple one to one USB connection is used, and also when other processes are closed down. For instance, I found that the Superdrive does not work when connected to the Macbook Pro through a USB-C to USB adaptor if the adaptor has multiple ports -- maybe it is dividing the power out through those ports and then the Superdrive gets inadequate power? If the adaptor is a simple one-to-one USB-C to USB converter, it works fine. Likewise, any external dock with multiple ports might suffer from this problem. Could this be a factor for you? Also, the iMac with the built in DVD burner works fine with its built in device but the external Superdrive did not work with it the one time I tried it (I forget why I tried that, seems it would be unnecessary given the built in burner).

You could also try creating a new user on one of your Macs and see if the new vanilla user does not have the problem.

I have found that about 1 in 10 DVD burning attempts results in a failed verification, I am guessing due to media irregularities. It helps to use name brand DVDs, I suspect they are more reliable. The DVD in those failed verifications can still be read, but I always throw those ones away and redo it.

I haven't tried burning a CD/DVD on a Mac in years, but I do know macOS itself only has the simplest built-in GUI tools for burning a disc. I don't know if a macOS command line tool will have more options to control the burn speed/settings or not. I suspect you have more control over the burn options on Gentoo than you do on macOS.

Ramattack wrote:

Thank for your answer but... The linux comment was just for clarifying the problem. All linux distros use the same software for burning isos (cdrdao and so...).. and they can be more or less flexible (although I normally use the gui directly).... but the problem is, is this broken in Mac OS?. You can't even mount an image!!. I think this is awful... How could be, that Mac OS doesn't work for this?. Could someone give me a clue or a workaround meanwhile Apple fixes this?.

Best regards,

Can you select the burn speed when burning a CD/DVD with macOS? If so, try a slower speed. The quality of the optical media can play a huge role in whether the disc can be read. Trying to read a burned disc on other players may not always succeed.

At least you know the hardware is working correctly and is not the problem.

macOS can mount some images through the GUI, but others may need to mounted manually through the command line by providing an offset to the partition you want mounted. macOS has problems when non-standard partitioning or layouts are used by the images. You might be able to use the macOS command line tools convert those .img or .iso files into a .dmg file which macOS might then be able to mount by double-clicking them in the Finder. I think the tool to convert images on macOS is "hdutil", but I am not entirely certain.