I downloaded an iso. I right-clicked on it and pressed "Burn iso to disk." Guess what it did?

It burned the ISO to the disk as a file, so when I look at the disk, it contains a single file... the iso. W T F seriously?

I burned an iso to a disk fine on OSX. maybe youre just a dummy!

Windows 7 has ISO burning built in

Use Disk Utility.

A damn good one too.

Because, you know, it takes a lot to burn an ISO.

I find alcohol 120% to be great for this sort of thing, but they don't have an OSX version unfortunately =/

This.

It's stupid but it's Apple. Nobody in their target audience ever needs to do something like this.

And yeah I wasted a disc the first time it happened to me too.

I always select Disk Utility when I get the action popup upon inserting media so I never really noticed. I can see how that could be bothersome though. It appears that Apple could simply have a popup or a checkbox that asks you if you want to make the disk bootable before burning when using your method.

You could also just mount the ISO, and burn the contents to disk.

not if you need it bootable

and also it's still easier than linux lolol

Yeah right... $ cdrecord whatever.iso

Anyway, yes, I did eventually find "disk utility" but this is moronic. And the cracks about mac users not needing to burn isos... well I don't know anyone like that. I was about to do a RAM upgrade yesterday so I wanted to back my crap up just in case. My apple crap is backed up automatically to an external firewire disk using "time machine." But I also have a windows partition. Apple is nice enough to provide boot camp so I can run windows natively, and they are nice enough to provide windows drivers for all the hardware, but their backup software, bootcamp, can't back up the windows partition.

So I downloaded clone zilla, a bootable cd image for making drive images. Which would be fine, but my usb disk was formatted to HFS for some other crap I had done, and the osx wouldn't format it to anything else. So I booted to windows and it refused to format the stupid thing as well -- gave some error about it being the boot disk (yeah right).

So, I hooked it up to linux and used gparted and it was formatted in 10 seconds.

Anyway, yeah, I got an image of my windows partition so I did the memory upgrade and now instead of 2GB I have...3! hooray (well, 3 in windows (32 bit) but it seems osx sees all 4.

But seriously? 3 operating systems to format a disk? 2 tries to burn an ISO? Really?

Sounds like a one-off case. Trust me. Im an expert.

It's true. He's experted me all the time.

sounds like someone doesn't know how to use something and they want to complain about it. 90% of the time people complain about a product it's because they didn't rtfm.

bwa bwa bwa me an JonC are both morons!!

in terminal in mac type "hdiutil burn blah.iso"

also mac includes dd, i don't know why you needed a livecd to backup anything.

Basically. I'm pretty sure Ive accidentally burned an ISO to a disc once, but I never had any issues formatting an HFS drive. NTFS drivers for OSX are the win too

and also if you have a disk that won't format, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskblah

you don't even have to let it run that long, then the partition table is gone and anything will format it.

It doesn't clone every byte, it just records the files in the file system, so it only backs up what I have, not a bunch of junk empty space.

pipe it through gzip and you'll have a compressed image that won't be a bunch of junk empty space

it's also a bit perfect backup, which makes me feel better

bs=512 count=1 to just overwrite the partition table.

(IIRC)

If I wanted to use the command line I'd use a command line OS that has a sane mouse acceleration curve. (Linux)

probably, i just usually let it run for a few seconds and then ctrl-c

well if you don't like the gui way of doing it, and you don't like the command line way of doing it...

Yeah, the mouse acceleration in OS X is funny.

install an operating system that is the happy medium between what Steve Jobs thinks the world should be and what Richard M. Stallman thinks the world should be, right.