Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC

More Mac Sites:
Macworld
MacUser
iPhone Central

Pick of the Week - Nov 10 [Show all picks]
Path Finder 5 - A feature-laden Finder replacement

12,000 hints and counting!

Fri, Apr 28 2006 at 7:30AM PDT • Contributed by: Anonymous

My daughter bought a cheap Windows PC a couple of years back to play the online game Final Fantasy XI. The company recently released a game expansion, but the software is on a DVD and her computer does not have a DVD drive. After trying to share the DVD drive from another PC and failing, we gave up on a pure Windows solution.

So we put the DVD in my Mac laptop's drive, and after it mounted, I opened Terminal and created a Unix link in my public directory to the DVD.

cd ~/Public

ln -s /Volumes/FFXI

Once her PC located the shared drive on my Mac, she could install the software as if the DVD drive was part of her computer.

•

Currently 0.00 / 5
1
2
3
4
5

(0 votes cast)

[30,523 views]

Hint Options

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC | 14 comments | Create New Account

Click here to return to the 'Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC' hint

The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: jctull on Fri, Apr 28 2006 at 9:38AM PDT

The link you show is not being created in the public directory. You moved to the public directory, then you made your link in the root disk's Volumes directory. I would expect that all of your shared volumes were available to the PC, not just the one that you thought was in your Public folder.

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: hypert on Fri, Apr 28 2006 at 10:03AM PDT

Tha man page for "ln" (as well as my own experience) says to me that this will work as intended. A symlink will be created in ~/Public that points to the DVD (/Volumes/FFXI). PC users mounting that person's SMB share will have access to that DVD. Note that I believe this will only give them access to that specific DVD, not the whole DVD drive. If you put another disc in, that link will be broken.

Also, don't forget about the wonderful SharePoints tool for sharing any folder/directory/drive, not just your homedir.

Wrong I'm afraid
Authored by: jeremyp on Sun, Apr 30 2006 at 4:04PM PDT


jeremyp@pamela:jeremyp$ ls /Volumes/
Macintosh HD Untitled
jeremyp@pamela:jeremyp$ mkdir Public
jeremyp@pamela:jeremyp$ cd Public/
jeremyp@pamela:Public$ ls    
jeremyp@pamela:Public$ ln -s /Volumes/Untitled 
jeremyp@pamela:Public$ ls 
Untitled
jeremyp@pamela:Public$

Wrong I'm afraid
Authored by: shand11 on Mon, Sep 11 2006 at 4:18PM PDT

Can you give a little more explination on this please?

---
Thanks So Much

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: peragrin on Fri, Apr 28 2006 at 9:47AM PDT

Actually my thought on that was to use the target disk mode of the mac. reboot into target disk mode and pop the disk in the drive. Windows should show it as a normal external device.

---
I thought once I was found but it was only a dream

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: AquaX on Fri, Apr 28 2006 at 11:20AM PDT

If it's a PC that's cheap enough to not have a DVD drive, I'd be surprised if it had a Firewire port.

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: digitol on Fri, Apr 28 2006 at 12:52PM PDT

Cool hint. You can't Target disk mode to a PC because mac format. Unless you have macdrive software for PC

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: las_vegas on Tue, May 2 2006 at 10:47PM PDT

Of course, you're right. You can't Target Disk Mode the Mac's hard drive to the PC because of the format, but you can Target Disk Mode the optical drive. The PC will simply ignore the Mac's HD and accept any DVD in Windows compatible format.

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: sapridyne on Fri, Apr 28 2006 at 4:06PM PDT

Easier solution -- make an ISO using toast or Disk Utility, copy the file to the PC, and use the freeware Windows app DaemonTools to mount it.

Sapridyne

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: rocteur on Sat, Apr 29 2006 at 2:55AM PDT

How can making an ISO be an easier solution ???

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: sapridyne on Mon, May 1 2006 at 8:14AM PDT

Uh... if creating an ISO is difficult to you -- or harder than the hint -- don't take my suggestion.

Sapridyne

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: rocteur on Sat, Apr 29 2006 at 3:01AM PDT

I actually tried this 2 weeks ago when Garmin brough out City Navigator 8 on DVD and the old notebook I'm using for Windows stuff only has as CDROM, when I tried to install, it said, permission denied on Windows. (Wintendo2000).

I then copied the content of the DVD to the Windows PC drive and reran the installation from there and that worked. I wonder what made the installer give me permission denied ? Perhaps windows was trying to write to read only mount ?

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: MurphyM on Thu, Feb 22 2007 at 7:13AM PST

This is an excellent tip. I used it to share an iPod connected to a Mac. The iPod is mac-formatted but I can sit at a PC and copy vcf contacts and other files onto it directly.

Details here:

http://murphymac.com/creating-mac-shares

Share a Mac DVD drive to a Windows PC
Authored by: digitaloxygen.ca on Wed, Feb 28 2007 at 5:36PM PST

I am looking for a way to do a "generic" DVD mount if that makes sense. Basically I want to setup a share that always points to the DVD drive regardless of what disc is inserted so I don't have to go back and recreate the share (i.e. change the disk name in the share) every time I put a new disk in.

Any ideas on how I could do that? I suppose I could create a shell script or apple script file to do it (i.e. change the share to match the current disk) each time it's run, but that sucks.

Search

From our Sponsor...

User Functions

Don't have an account yet? Sign up as a New User
Lost your password?

What's New:

Hints

3 new Hints in the last 24 hours

Comments last 2 days

Links last 2 weeks

No recent new links

What's New in the Forums?

The Editor's Corner...

Here are some of my (robg) other projects...

•	The Robservatory My blog - Macs, tech, etc.
•	Mac OS X Power Hound The best of Hints in print
•	Inside iWork An iWork training DVD
•	Macworld Column, features, online...

Hints by Topic

News from Macworld

The macosxhints Poll

iPad_poll_#1

Other polls | 7,021 votes | 76 comments

Visit other IDG sites: