As a relatively recent Mac convert I had one of those ‘Well how do you do that then?’ moments today when I wanted to write an ISO file CD. As a past user of disc burning software on Windows, I expected to find a ‘Burn Image to Disc’ option either by right-clicking on the file or in the ‘Burn CD’ dialog, but no such option exists. I then went to the Disk Utility in OS X in search of more options, but again, no mention of writing ISO images to disc and, rather confusingly, the ‘Burn’ option is disabled when you select your blank disc from the list. So just how do you do it?
The answer is found within Disk Utility and is not a solution you would stumble upon blindly. The following steps are your path to ISO burning heaven:
- Insert a blank CD or DVD
- Open Finder and navigate to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
- From the File menu, select ‘Open Disk Image’ or press Apple+Option+O.
- Select the ISO file you want to burn. This will mount the ISO and add it to the list of volumes.
- Select the mounted ISO volume from the left-hand list in the Disk Utility window
- Click the ‘Burn’ button in the top left corner of Disk Utility
- Select your CD/DVD drive from the list of devices
- Click ‘Burn’
This process works with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
