Reading older CDs

Pamela Mullen2 Said:

"Reading older CDs: [...]I can read about 250 of them, but some important stuff is on the older ones. I have them all catalogued, so I know what is there it just takes an enormous amount of time to retrieve it."

-------

Try a Virtual Machine:

Maybe Using a Virtual Machine would do the Trick?

If there ends up being not solution for viewing these on the macOS, consider using a Virtual Machine(VM) for reading these(Windows-in-a-window). You would open items in the VM, and run it right off of that. When plugging in the drive, make it accessible to the Virtual Machine. You'd be prompted which to use the drive on: The VM or the macOS. If the Virtual Machine is working, you will get this popup message.

All would be accessed and would operate as desired on the VM. Virtual Machine applications include VMWare Fusion and Parallels. Learn more here: What Is a Virtual Machine? - VMWare Support.

I am using Macs with Mac OS X El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave and Catalina.

I also have Data CD's and DVD's dating back almost twenty years, these disks were written long

before these OS's were released. I can see these CD's and DVD's across all of the OS's mentioned above.

The disks all appear on the Desktop and in the Sidebar under Locations, and any items on the disks can

easily be dragged and dropped onto the Desktop or any nominated folder. These disks contain like yours

images, documents and movies. The majority of these disks would have been created using Toast Titanium

and using a disk burning protocol that would make disks readable on both Macs and PC's.

Can you remember how your older CD/ DVD disks were made.

Which OS was your Mac running when you created these CD/ DVD's, if it

was High Sierra and these CD/ DVD's were not 'finished' (the lead out track was not written)

then that might be an answer to why they cannot be read on another Mac or OS,

but still be able to be read on High Sierra.

Any further information on how these disks were created may prove useful.

If there is still no further progress then you can transfer the data on the CD/ DVD's

to an external hard drive, or USB sticks on your High Sierra Mac and transfer the

data to your Mojave or Catalina Mac that way.

As you are running a dual boot system, Catalina on the internal drive, and High Sierra on your external drive,

you can boot to High Sierra, insert your CD/ DVD's and drag the items you want directly to the Catalina - Data

HD, just navigate through the folder structure to an area you want them to be. You could even create an alias

to the folder on the Catalina - Data HD on your High Sierra Desktop. Whilst in High Sierra navigate through the

folder structure on the Catalina -Data HD to the Desktop and create a folder called for example CD/DVD imports,

then in Finder click on File> Make Alias, drag the CD/ DVD Import alias to your High Sierra Desktop.

Now you can drag any items on your CD/ DVD's to the CD/ DVD Import alias folder on your High Sierra

Desktop and the files will be directly copied to your Catalina - Data HD. This will reduce the time penalty to

only that of booting between the two OS's.

I've seen other reports where macOS seems to have trouble reading really old Mac hard drives from the PPC era which did partition the drives differently.

You may be able to use a Linux boot disc to access the older CDs/DVDs plus Linux is free to download and use. I know Linux can easily read on Mac hard drives from before 2005 so it should also be able to CD/DVDs as well. If the discs are using HFS, then it may be necessary to install the HFS driver which should be available from the Linux distribution's software repository.

If you have a 2015 or earlier Mac or a standard PC, then creating a bootable Knoppix USB drive would be the easiest way to boot Linux and access your CD/DVDs. If you have a 2016+ Mac or just want to install Linux into a VM, then you can use the free Virtual Box VM and one of the Ubuntu flavors or Linux Mint.

Also it is possible to download Windows 10 direct from Microsoft and use it in a trial mode.

Let's address the 32bit, 64bit issue. The issue only involves apps, Catalina does not run 32bit apps,

any files created by apps that are 32bit can be read or edited on Catalina using appropriate apps,

the docs, images, pdfs, whatever file type, are not 32bit in themselves.

As said before I have plenty of files created years ago on 32bit software on older Mac OS's and they

can be opened and edited on Catalinas 64 bit apps.

The HD SSD issue is not part of this conversation. Catalina is APFS only.

High Sierra and Mojave can be HFS+ or APFS.

HD/SSDs formatted as APFS can read and write to HD/SSDs formatted as HFS+.

MacOS's Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave if formatted as HFS+ can read and write to APFS

formatted HD/SSDs.

Mac OS X's El Capitan and earlier cannot read or write to APFS formatted HD/SSDs.

But all this talk of HDs and SSDs is besides the point and not pertinent to your

original question about CD/DVDs not showing up in Catalina.

Without knowing how your older CD/DVDs were created using which writing protocol in Toast Titanium

then it may be difficult to advise further.

I also have CD/DVDs that I know were created in MacOS X 10.2 Jaguar on a Mac G5 Tower, and Mac G4 QuickSilver

and they can all be read on all the OS's I currently use including Mojave and Catalina.

Were these older CD/DVDs made before Mac OS X came out, for example on OS 9 or OS 7.

Have you checked to see if the CD/DVD reader writer you are using is compatible with

macOS Mojave or macOS Catalina. If it is a third party CD/DVD perhaps there are drivers

that need to be downloaded and installed so it becomes operational in Mojave and

Catalina, check with the manufacturer.

Have you tried the option of creating an aliased folder to your Catalina Desktop as

described above, all you need to do there is to drag the files you want from the CD/DVD

into the aliased folder, they will then be copied directly to your Catalina drive.

All you need do is boot to Catalina where you can start doing whatever you want to do with them.

Pamela Mullen2 wrote:

Yes, I kind of figured that it is because of HFS as opposed to HFS+. It just seems like there is no easy solution. I have the one where a High Sierra external boot drive will work, but it is a lot of time—and it was excruciating to figure out how to get the installation on to it. And thankfully I indexed all those disks. Other solutions that might let me work within my Macintosh HD involved too much money (install Windows—after it is purchased) or knowledge (do something with Linux —I'm the tech support person in my household, but Linux is well beyond my ken). I'm sad Apple didn't provide a solution when they made these changes. I've been an Apple user since close to its beginning (I even proudly bought a 40MB hard drive to attach to cute little Mac a million years ago).

If you install Knoppix into a Virtual Box VM, then Knoppix may just work since Knoppix includes a lot of utilities and drivers by default. Since it is all free it only takes a little time to try it out to see if it will work for you. The great thing about Knoppix is it is self contained so you don't need to install anything if you have the VM boot the Knoppix .iso image file.

Usually when you attach a drive to a Linux system you will be prompted to allow mounting the drive and opening a file explorer window. Linux isn't always as difficult as it has been made out to be. I actually find Windows and macOS to be more difficult to work with these days.

It may be possible to install macOS into a Virtual Box VM as well, but it may not be as easy to do as it would be with Parallels.

Well if certain disks don't read on Catalina, nothing will make them.

But as you have mentioned these disks will mount when you are booted to High Sierra.

So as I have said before go to High Sierra, insert your CD/DVDs and drag the contents you want to

use into an aliased folder that links directly to your Catalina Data Desktop.

What exactly are you wanting to do with these files.

As has been stated before in all likely hood going forward the option to read from CD/DVDs may

disappear altogether so moving your data from these CD/DVDs to another media like an external

hard drive would prove prudent.

Ah, see Malcolm's great post here...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251765370?answerId=253388361022#253388361022

Just going to start off with a very basic one, in your newer macOS Mojave or Catalina have you selected the option in Finder> Preferences to show CD/DVDs and iPods on the Desktop.