After enduring the frustration of searching around the net for a good tutorial that explains how to burn a Mac/PC hybrid CD, I found this on Roxio’s Toast support site. It’s pretty complete but since I’m a PC person there were a few gaps I wasn’t able to fill in myself. After spitting out more coaster sets than I care to mention, I’ve created a real simple step-by-step guide to burning hybrid CDs. And I’m going to share it with you.

The most important thing you need to know is that you absolutely can not burn a hybrid CD with a PC. It has to be done on a Mac, at least as far as I can tell. Maybe it can be done on a PC, but I couldn’t figure it out. If anybody else can do it, show me how.

So without further ado, here’s the skinny:

1. Launch the Disk Utility in OS X (it’s under Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility)
2. At the top of the Disk Utility window, click on New Image
3. Name the image what you want the CD to be called. Set the Desktop as the destination and adjust the size of the image so that it can fit all the data you’ll be burning.
4. Select Create. This will mount a disk image on the Desktop.
5. Close the Disk Utility
6. Drag the Mac CD contents (i.e. leave out the PC-specific stuff) into the new disk image
7. Launch Toast (I’m using v5.2.3 because the latest version 6 doesn’t seem to support hybrid CDs very well) and select Custom Hybrid from the Other menu at the top.
8. Press the Select Mac… button and then choose the disk image you just created
9. If applicable, choose the file for AutoStart (but be aware that OS X doesn’t support AutoStart and most OS 9 users disable that feature)
10. Press the Select ISO… button (this is the data that will go on the PC) and drag in the same disk image (if you’re sharing data between the Mac/PC versions of the CD) as well as any PC-specific files, like autorun.inf.
11. Burn it!

Simple as that.