Burning Battles and Dusty Victories

The quest for the perfect multi-boot system continues, and this time, fire is on our side – well, burning fire, to be precise. We need to create bootable installation discs for our vintage operating systems, and Disk Utility, the macOS burning software, seems like the natural choice.

Max Speed, Big Mistake

However, the path to burning bliss is not without its bumps. Initially, we set Disk Utility to "Max Possible" speed. After all, who wouldn't want a speedy disc creation? But alas, this burning blaze resulted in a verification failure, leaving us with a potentially unreliable disc.

Lower Speeds, Lower Results

We attempted to tame the flames by opting for lower burning speeds. This seemed like a reasonable compromise, but alas, the fiery beast reared its head again, spewing a "buffer underrun error." Frustrated but determined, we pressed on.

Burning Bright, But Crashing Hard

Intriguingly, both the high-speed and low-speed burns yielded discs that could boot from. They proudly displayed the coveted 10.4 installer screen. However, victory turned to ashes as the installer itself sputtered and died with a vague "encountered an error" message. What sorcery was this?

The Graveyard of Optical Drives

Desperate for a solution, we raided our "Spare Parts" collection, a treasure trove of defunct electronics. We unearthed a graveyard of optical drives, each a relic from a bygone era. Sadly, none of them were natively supported by the ancient beast that is Mac OS X 10.3.

A Glimmer of Hope (and Dust)

Dejected, we started to suspect our trusty MSI burner. Perhaps it was too modern, a technological marvel incompatible with the software of the past. With a sigh, we reached even further back in time, pulling out a dusty BTC BCE5232IM burner. This relic, a simple CD burner dating back to 2003 (not even a DVD reader!), seemed like a long shot. But hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Surprisingly, the venerable BTC burner exhibited the same burning woes as its more modern counterpart. Discs were created, but the 10.4 installer remained stubbornly resistant. Just when we were about to throw in the towel, a glimmer of hope emerged. We stumbled upon an online discussion – a hidden oasis in the vast desert of the internet – detailing a method to coax almost any burner into working with Disk Utility on 10.3.

The short version is that you create a device profile that looks something like this:

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <array>
    <dict>
      <key>DRDevicePersonalities</key>
      <array>
        <dict>
          <key>DRDeviceProductName</key>
          <string>CDRW/DVD SM-348B</string>
          <key>DRDeviceVendorName</key>
          <string>SAMSUNG</string>
        </dict>
      </array>
      <key>DRDeviceProfile</key>
      <dict>
        <key>DRDeviceDescription</key>
        <string>16x48x24x48 Combo</string>
      </dict>
      <key>DRDeviceProfileVersion</key>
      <integer>1</integer>
    </dict>
  </array>
</plist>

Between building the device profile and using Toast I was able to successfully
burn the disc and install 10.4. Now I just need to figure out how to boot back into 10.3!

Burning a CD with Toast