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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > how to make .img disk images with OS X disk copy

how to make .img disk images with OS X disk copy
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arcticmac
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May 31, 2004, 08:26 PM
 
(I hope I picked the right forum for this.. anyway, here goes)

One of the things it'd be nice to do is to be able to still MAKE Mac OS 9 compatible disk images. That way if you have to use OS 9 to recover from a backup, you can do it. Handily, OS X can open the .img files too! However, creating them is a different story. For a long time, the only way i found was to boot up in OS 9 and make the images there. At long last I have now found a way to do it directly in Mac OS X.

One last thing, before we begin. All this is done under OS 10.2. I sincerely hope that Apple has made the process work correctly in 10.3 or 10.4 (yet to be released) so that you can simply image a folder as an NDIF image. Until then...

1. If you've never done this before, you get to do your one step in the terminal now. After doing this once, you can skip this step. All you have to do is open Mac OS X's Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/) and type in
Code:
defaults write com.apple.DiskCopy expert-mode 1
and hit return. There. That wasn't so bad.
2. Now, you can go fire up Disk Copy. On the way there check to see how big your files that you want to put on the image are.
3. In Disk Copy, create a new image, which should be approximately 1% larger in size than your files(in order to make sure it's big enough). Tell Disk Copy to make it a Sparse Disk Image(.sparseimage) with no partition map:
4. Disk Copy should create the image and mount it in the Finder for you. On my computer the system puts up an error saying something along the lines of "you have inserted a disk that Mac Os X cannot read. what do you want to do?" The ignore button seems to work well for me. Anyway, select all your files that should be on the disk image and copy them over to the disk image. Unmount the image. (If you accidentally made your image too small, I think sparse disk images are supposed to be resizable so you can try to do that if you like)
5. Back in Disk Copy, select the "Convert Image..." option. Select the sparse disk image and convert it to one of the NDIF formats (all of them are OS 9 disk image formats). For the things I do, NDIF Compressed is the best setting, but feel free to experiment. This is what the convert window might look like:
6. Now you get to wait for a long time while disk copy makes your image. As far as I can tell it's not any faster in OS 9, so that must just be the way it is.
7. When Disk Copy finishes, you are pretty much done. You should go and delete the .sparseimage file, since you don't need it anymore. If you find that Disk Copy's expert mode drives you bonkers, you can change things back by typing "defaults delete com.apple.DiskCopy expert-mode" in the Terminal.



more info here: http://arcticmac.home.comcast.net/tu...s/dimages.html
     
Mithras
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May 31, 2004, 09:41 PM
 
Thanks! You should submit this to MacOSXHints.com if you haven't already.
     
arcticmac  (op)
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May 31, 2004, 11:03 PM
 
I haven't yet. what's the best way to do that? their forum? should I mail it?

edit: nevermind... I seem to have found it... right at the top "submit hint". that'll teach me to ask before looking, or so i hope.

edit2: ok, done. it's all submitted.
( Last edited by arcticmac; Jun 1, 2004 at 12:09 AM. )
     
Rickster
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Jun 1, 2004, 09:43 PM
 
On any version of Mac OS X, you can also convert normal GUI-created (i.e., they don't need to be sparse) disk images to NDIF format using the command line hdiutil tool. The man page for it is pretty straightforward, as is the output of hdiutil -help.
Rick Roe
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