CD Master: one last follow-up: startup freezes; more pros and cons; Making a bootable CD

Reader reports regarding CD Master (see previous coverage) continued to fill our mail bag this weekend. Clearly, there is a wide spread of opinion on this software. Some find it the answer to all the problems they have had with alternative software, such as Toast. Others find it unusable. We can only hope that Radialogic works the kinks out in future updates to this promising product. For now, here's what we intend to be our final collection of user experiences: Startup freezes Reports on VersionTracker, most of which are negative, indicate that some users have startup freezes after installing CD Master. MacFixIt reader Charles Riser was one such user. He eventually traced his freezes to a conflict with certain USB peripherals connected to his iMac: "It seems that the CD Master extensions simply do not play well with my LaCie 10G USB drive or my SuperDisk. If I leave these two devices unplugged, the computer will start up just fine." Failure to recognize drives or to burn After working around the freeze problem, Charles Riser could still not get a successful burn: "I get an error message telling me that the software doesn't recognize my drive mechanism! What really irks me by this point is that Radialogic specifically mentions that this drive is supported. Perhaps it has to do with the problem Radialogic cites with certain 'USB cabling (bridge) systems.'" Keith Baxter found: "After I downloaded and installed the latest CD Master 1.0.3, it recognized my USB LaCie 4x4x24 CDRW but complained that a communication error caused a failure to burn. Even when I tried the 'backdoor' method (Control-Shift), I still got the same error message. The CD-R media came out of the drive absolutely blank and I was able to burn to it using the Toast extensions when I had re-installed them." Several MacFixIt readers found that CD Master would not recognize Yamaha SCSI drives connected via< various SCSI adapter cards to G3/G4 Macs. However, last time, we posted a reader who had success with such a system. We recently tried to use CD Master with our LaCie FireWire drive and joined the ranks of those who could not get the software to work. We initially got the "drive not supported error." We then tried the backdoor method and bypassed that error. However, it would still not work. We got a "-108" error instead. Success Steven Hackstadt had positive results: "Using a QPS FireWire CD-RW drive, I downloaded the latest preview, installed it, and burned the same collection of AIFF files that so many times had resulted in a less-than-perfect audio CD when I used Toast. And guess what? The disc burned flawlessly. No extra audio snippets. Not a single glitch." Tip: Making bootable CDs To make a bootable CD with CD Master, you need to select to make a "Data CD" and then use a volume or disk image (not a folder!). At this point, if you select Recording Options (and if necessary, the Volume Copy CD Type), you will see Make Bootable as an item. If it is checked, the disc you make should be bootable - assuming the disc has a System Folder on it.