How do I copy files from a DVD to my hard drive?

For some odd reason, I'm having a very difficult time moving my files from my old PC to my new MacBook. I burned everything to a DVD and was able to copy some smaller files, but larger directories don't seem to work.

I currently have two finder windows open and when I try to drag a directory of files from the DVD into my "Sites" directory on the MacBook, I get a small grey circle with a line through it. Why am I not allowed to copy files here? The directory I'm trying to copy has a bunch of subdirectories that contain all the files for the various websites that I work on. This is EXTREMELY frustrating...

Your help is greatly appreciated!

Try copying them to the desktop and see what happens.

Was your older PC running Linux or a unix variant perchance? This sounds like you don't have read permission to the folders in question, even on the DVD.

Lets apply the strongest technology available on the Mac to solve this problem... Terminal.app! Go to your Utilities folder (use the SHFT+CMD+U keystroke to bring it up) and select Terminal.app from the resulting window.

From there, and assuming that your DVD is available as /Volumes/dvd_name (where "dvd_name" is the name the DVD icon shows on your desktop), type the following magic into Terminal:

mkdir dvd_contents
sudo cp -rf /Volumes/dvd_name/* ~/Documents/dvd_contents

Enter the admin password when challenged and it will take off. This will give you admin rights and then, using those rights, recursively copy the entire contents of the DVD to your Documents/dvd_contents directory.

Now enter:

sudo chown +R your_userid: /Users/your_userid/Documents/dvd_contents

This will reassign ownership of all files in the dvd_contents folder hierarchy to your userid (replace "your_userid" in the above with your actual Mac userid).

Hopefully, all should be well now. You can exit Terminal.app and use whatever means you are most comfortable with to move the files out of the dvd_contents dir and place them wherever you like.