Scraping the Cube: Part II, You Can't Get That on Here
When I woke up this morning, I started to sense that I was entering a world of pain. "Don't I already have enough computer drama in my life?" I was hoping that going with Linux instead of OS X would save me my usual OS X headaches (and $130), but that's looking less and less likely. Hooking up the Cube to the TV was no big deal. The Cube was even good enough to detect the TV's wacky 1360x768 resolution and accommodate it. I don't have audio at the moment because the frickin' cube doesn't have an analog audio output . . . only USB. I have a USB audio device at work, but didn't think to bring it home last night.
I started by burning the Ubuntu ISO to a disc. I was immediately met with an issue: the burn failed. Huh. The software offered to try again on another disc. This time, it used a slower burn speed and made it all the way through. I put the disc in the Cube and waited. And waited. The Cube's drive made awful grinding noises as it tried in vain to read the disc. I was astonished by the dialog box that eventually appeared: the disc couldn't be read; would I like to initialize it or eject it? The "initialize" part is funny because the drive isn't a burner. Hmph. Could it just be that the OS doesn't want to acknowledge the files on there, but it will work on boot?
Immediately, the folly of the Mac's "I will not tolerate the presence of an unreadable disc in my drive" prissiness was apparent. I would have to put the disc in between pressing the power button and the BIOS's check of the hard drive. Argh. OK, let's try it. Nope, didn't even sound like it gave the CD a glance. A little research found that holding the "C" key on boot will force it to use the CD. Nope, that didn't do it either. In both cases, of course, the Finder insisted on ejecting the disc as soon as it realized it was unreadable. I put the disc in my laptop to confirm that it was burned but not toasted. Indeed, Windows had no difficulty navigating it. I put in a different data disc, and the Cube mounted that just fine, so it wasn't a total failure of the drive.
I'm now forced to conclude that the drive in the Cube can't handle 700MB CD-Rs, or at least not the ones I have. Huh. What can else can I use for bootable media? Next idea: download a DVD image of Fedora Core 6. That's only *gulp* four gigabytes. And the estimated download time is, um, ten hours. Grr.
I started by burning the Ubuntu ISO to a disc. I was immediately met with an issue: the burn failed. Huh. The software offered to try again on another disc. This time, it used a slower burn speed and made it all the way through. I put the disc in the Cube and waited. And waited. The Cube's drive made awful grinding noises as it tried in vain to read the disc. I was astonished by the dialog box that eventually appeared: the disc couldn't be read; would I like to initialize it or eject it? The "initialize" part is funny because the drive isn't a burner. Hmph. Could it just be that the OS doesn't want to acknowledge the files on there, but it will work on boot?
Immediately, the folly of the Mac's "I will not tolerate the presence of an unreadable disc in my drive" prissiness was apparent. I would have to put the disc in between pressing the power button and the BIOS's check of the hard drive. Argh. OK, let's try it. Nope, didn't even sound like it gave the CD a glance. A little research found that holding the "C" key on boot will force it to use the CD. Nope, that didn't do it either. In both cases, of course, the Finder insisted on ejecting the disc as soon as it realized it was unreadable. I put the disc in my laptop to confirm that it was burned but not toasted. Indeed, Windows had no difficulty navigating it. I put in a different data disc, and the Cube mounted that just fine, so it wasn't a total failure of the drive.
I'm now forced to conclude that the drive in the Cube can't handle 700MB CD-Rs, or at least not the ones I have. Huh. What can else can I use for bootable media? Next idea: download a DVD image of Fedora Core 6. That's only *gulp* four gigabytes. And the estimated download time is, um, ten hours. Grr.