Toast 6 And Old Age

[Jim Balmer]

For reasons of age and the lack of disposable cash that comes with it, I am forced to rely on my PowerMac G5 running System 10.4.11.

My Toast Titanium 6.0.3 [serial number is TSID 7091 4875 9751] is no longer capable of operating properly. Two recent attempts to use it failed to verify correctly and now it is simply reporting 'You cannot open the application "Toast 6 Titanium" because it may be damaged or incomplete'.

My last few attempts to record a data disk it did not offer the option of encryption and password protection, which is important to me as the producer of many books and journals which are the copyright of their authors or editors.

I almost certainly have any disks that it came on (unless it was bought online and came as a download package) but most of my library and possessions are still unpacked due to me being over 80 and incapable of shifting stacks of heavy boxes.

When I put these problems to Corel Customer Support I received the helpful reply: As much as I wanted to help you, we do not have any back up installer for Toast 6. I have checked every link on my end and I can't find Toast 6 installer. We cannot also offer an upgrade since your MAC OS is not compatible to the newer version of Toast. My best advice is to go to our Roxio forum site and create a thread for it. Hopefully someone has still a copy of Toast 6 which they can share."

 

So here I am. in the UK and trawling the internet and hoping someone on this Forum may be able and willing to help.

 

Thanks for looking,

 

Jim Balmer

[d_deweywright]

Your best bet is to either find the discs you bought it on, or locate the download (either still on your system, or hopefully also backed up to optical media too?) and reinstall it. Invite someone with a younger back to help you move your boxes around so you can rummage through them. That's the best bet.

 

Otherwise, maybe someone here with a Mac and that version may be able to help you out. I'm not that person.

[tsantee]

Have you ever backed up your Mac's hard drive? If so, you can copy Toast from it to replace the damaged one.

[Jim Balmer]

Thanks d deweywright, thanks tsantee,

 

How and when my Toast 6.0.3 Titanium went wrong is still not clear, but things are happening.

 

I have managed to buy a boxed copy of Toast 6 at auction and as soon as it arrives I will create a Mac Archive of the contents and key and send it to Corel so that they can make it available again. When I have done that I will confirm my action and quote the full version number.

 

Having also purchased the necessary equipment, I will set about examining older hard drives removed at various times as software increasingly became bloatware. I expect to find working installations on several of these. The drives themselves range from 10 Gb to 800 Gb, figures I mention solely to mark the ever-upward appetite of software developers.

 

If I ever used an earlier version of Toast I shall try to rescue it, but that is less likely. We would be getting back to a time when Syquest disks were the normal means of transferring information between designers and filmsetters in the UK.

 

I did have one unexpected find that raises my hope of unearthing all my software master disks eventually. When I opened one of the big heavy boxes packed by the removals people and marked 'Kitchen'. I found what I was looking for ... and down at the bottom and the source of much of the weight was my venerable Mac Plus and its 20 Mb Hard Drive ... and that size is NOT a misprint!

 

I hope this is good news for others.

 

[Suhr]

I had a similar problem with Toast 6.0.3 dmg.

Every one of my many Mac Pro's on systems all the way back to Tiger 10.4 would state that the file is damaged and or could cause damage to my system.

How very strange.... this happened even on archived versions of the file.

I did find a solution but it will not be of much help here. I opened the disc image with Stuffit Expander 14 from Stuffit Deluxe 10. Once open I made a read/write disc image and restored the contents to it. Then I did a disk repair with Disk Utility or Disk Warrior and finally, converted the read/write back to read only.

Here is the truly odd thing.... I did not need to do any of that disc image work or repair. Once the dmg was opened with Stuffit Expander, all of my Macs and their systems opened and read the disc image just fine. I have nearly no explanation other than the basic function of dynamic linker.

If you can find Stuffit Expander 14 you have a solution, keep in mind that the Stuffit Expander you need must decompress .hqx files.Toast 6 was made for PPC machines.

Woops, forgot to mention my other test effort.

I made a disc image directly from the original retail Toast 6 Titanium CD.

Amazingly!.... the brand new squeaky clean disc image had the exact same problem as the Toast 6.0.3 dmg downloaded file.

It was that effort that made me realize something strange was going on and starting thinking about PPC compressed file formats.

That error made me try Stuffit Expander 14. (it was that or try one of my G5's or G4's)

My other related post shows how to make Jam 6.0.3 run on an Intel Mac. ( https://forums.support.roxio.com/topic/59583-running-jam-on-an-intel-snow-leopard-machine/ )

Edited April 14, 2019 by Suhr