Installer Will Not Recognize DVD

Problem: the X-Plane 9 DVD is not recognized on OS X, even though it is in a DVD drive.

Symptoms:

• The installer simply says “Please insert X-Plane 9 DVD number one to begin”.
• X-Plane goes into “demo” mode after 10 minutes.

Simple Trouble Shooting

• Verify that the X-Plane 9 DVD is in the drive and appears in the Finder as a mounted volume.
• Verify that you are using the latest version of X-Plane and the installer. The installer version history can be looked up here – make sure that you have the latest one. Download a new DVD installer here.
• Verify that you do not have any other drive named “XPLANE9”. If you have a second DVD or hard drive named XPLANE9, the DVD may be mounted as “XPLANE9 1” and might not load properly.

Incorrectly Mounted Disk Image

There is a bug in OS X that causes disk drives to sometimes be incorrectly mounted with the wrong name at a low level.

Diagnosing the Problem

To diagnose this, with the X-Plane 9 DVD in the drive:

1. Observe the name of the X-Plane DVD in the Finder. Is it “X-Plane9 1”?

2. Launch the “terminal” application (it can be found in the Applications folder, Utilities subfolder). In terminal, type

ls -la /Volumes/

and press return. You will see a listing of all your hard drive name and inserted DVDs including both “XPLANE9” and “XPLANE9 1”.

3. Eject the X-Plane 9 DVD drive (you may have to quit Terminal to do this, then restart it) and repeat the above step. The disk should be ejected, but “XPLANE9” should still be visible.

(In this picture, the DVD has been mounted as “XPLANE9 “1” but no other drives named XPLANE9 are present!)

If you can confirm all three of these steps, you may have this bug.

Fixing the Problem

IMPORTANT: It is ABSOLUTELY critical that you do not have a hard drive named XPLANE9. If you follow these steps and you have a hard drive named XPLANE9, it could cause data loss. If you are not sure about what to do next, email X-Plane tech support (info at x-plane dot com).

Steps to fix the problem:

1. EJECT the XPLANE9 DVD.

2. Make sure you have NO OTHER HARD DRIVE named XPLANE9 3. Reboot.

4. Launch terminal again and type

open /Volumes/

In there you will see one or more folder labeled XPLANE9, XPLANE9 1, etc. Delete any of them that are XPLANE9 or XPLANE9 #, where # is a number. You may have to give your admin password to do this!

5. Reboot again.

6. Insert the DVD, confirm that the DVD now mounts as XPLANE9 in the Finder.

At this point the installer should work.

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