September 2002 Archives

Although the much enhanced Disk Copy under OS X offers great support for various disk image formats, it is limited to supporting data disk images. Toast also can support making disk images of other CD types - especially Audio CDs

Toast makes use of a kernel extension to handle a lot of it's disk image magic, particularly the mounting of disk images as virtual disks on the desktop.

Under 10.2.x, Apple made changes to the kernel extension system to make it more secure and stable. Previously kernel extensions could be owned by any user, however as they run at such a low level in the OS hierarchy, this created a security loophole whereas an untrusted kernel extension could be installed and run with non admin rights.

These changes however have broken Toast's disk image handling kernel extension which is hidden inside the Toast application package so that it will no longer mount disk images.

The following procedure outlines how to fix this.

cdrtools is an open source cd mastering and burning framework which is available for most Unix OS and also for windows.

Because of it's cross platform base and it's non consumer focus, there is no other tools that has the premastering capabilities that it posseses. As a result of this, many X11 based frontends have bene built to harness it's power and it forms the heart of some excellent solutions including the windows based bcd tool made by Bart Lagerweij .

cdrtools is however a bit fiddly to get working on OS X.2. The following instructions simplify this