Duplicate a DVD

You might want copies of certain DVD disks, like your OS X install disks. You can duplicate them using Disk Utility - which is built into your OS.

If your originals become scratched or just stop working you’ll still have a disk. Murphy suggested you keep a copy of the My Mac Won’t Boot print-out in your laptop bag. That’s a good place to keep your Tiger install disk copy too.

Murphy had no trouble copying the retail Tiger disk he bought for his PPC G5. The DVD holds less than 3GB of data. But the Tiger disk that came with his Macbook Pro has a lot more data on it. Copying such a disk is a little trickier. We’ll come back to that in a second.

Murphy has always used the procedure in this Apple Support Document for disk burning. Most of those disks were iDVD projects or backup disks.

But an article at CreativeBits has a different suggestion for copying your oversized Tiger Install DVD. Based on comments for the post you should follow the steps exactly.

There are a number of comments where users report a “not enough space” error when they try to burn. Nobody has posted a solution to that issue, but Murphy suspects they aren’t using dual-layer DVDs. Your Mac may or may not be capable of burning dual-layer disks.

Using the method in the Apple Support Document Murphy successfully created a bootable Tiger PPC DVD using a single-layer disk. We’ll update this post after trying the method used in the CreativeBits guide on a bigger disk. But based on the comment thread it appears to work.

Don’t forget to back up your MiniDV tapes too!

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