Friday - The Automatic FAQ Maker
Scenario: When tested the CD on a PC, the CD will not open the original document when clicking on the thumbnail. A dialog requests inserting the same CD as already mounted in the CD drive. (The CD was burned on a Mac following instructions exactly for Hybrid CDs).
Likely problem: The CD name/label may be too long for some older Win 95 operating systems!
Check to ensure that the CD that Portfolio is prompting for is exactly the same as the name shown beside the PC CD-Rom drive icon when the disk is inserted.
Although 12 character labels should and usually do work when using Joliet, some PC users report problems CDs using 12 character names/labels that ran perfectly on Windows NT but not on Win 95 machines, with the same symptoms as describe above. Looking at the CD name as shown beside the CD-Rom drive in 'My Computer', it is apparent the last character had been dropped. By renaming the CDs (don't forget to update your paths) to 11 characters, the problem goes away.
Why should 12 characters vs. 11 matter? The ISO 9660 spec - the lowest common denominator for pan-OS use of CDs allows 8.3 filenames for files, folders and the volume name (= label). Surely 8 + . + 3 = 12 characters? So the max allowable volume name length should be 12, with the volume name myvolume.123 arguably being the same as myvolume1234. Not so for older Windows 9x systems, it seems. Stay with 11 characters for your volume name and you should be OK. In fact if you're bored enough to look up the CD format documentation, I recall it does actually say ISO 9660 compatible volume names should not exceed 11 characters. It's best to use capitals for the volume name too, to avoid those hard to trace 'under the hood' problems.
The lesson here is that if you need to go to a wide cross-platform, be very conservative with your naming. I never use any names file/folder/volume that exceeds 8 characters in such circumstances. You can't bill the time lost fixing an avoidable self-inflicted problem!
Question: Windows 9x PC asks for CD already mounted (Mac authored Hybrid CD) [FAQ00175.htm]
Last Update:- 31 May 2006
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