Creating disk images

Submitted by Ivan on Tue, 2006-03-21 13:28.

You have to be careful when you use your DVD drive on your laptop. It drains a lot of battery power. Also, if you're on the road you may not want to deal with multiple disks.

In such situations the power of disk image comes to the resque. You can create a virtual disk image of your CD or DVD and store it on your hard drive temporarily. It will mount exactly as the original except your Mac will be able to read data from it much faster.

To create a disk image open Applications /Utilities /Disk Utility. Once you insert your optical media (CD or DVD) it will mount on the left sidebar. Select the media and not the drive itself. Now, just click the icon New Image and select the location to save the disk image. There are options to create the image as compressed to save disk space and make the image password protected. Select your preference. Once the process is finished you can eject the media. Any time you need your virtual disk, just double click the .dmg file that has been created to mount your virtual disk. Once you're done with it, you can simply trash the .dmg file to free up space on your hard drive.

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For the more adventurous...

Submitted by Enigma on Tue, 2006-03-21 14:55.

For the more adventurous, you can also create disk images in Terminal with hdiutil. The major benefit of this is it allows you to create hybrid disk images with multiple file systems. It can contain HFS+ for Mac, Joliet for Windows, and ISO9660 for everything else. As far as I know, this isn't possible in Disk Utility.

From the man pages for it:

makehybrid -o image source
Generate a potentially-hybrid filesystem in a read-only disk
image using the DiscRecording framework's content creation
system.

source can either be a directory or a disk image. The gener-
ated image can later be burned using burn, or converted to
another read-only format with convert. By default, the
filesystem will be readable on most modern computing plat-
forms.

ZIP/Stuff alternative too

Submitted by mijlee on Wed, 2006-03-22 16:02.

I also use this tecnique as a replacement for zipping or stuffing files to send to clients over email. In my experience you tend to get less file corruption (especially with fonts) and if you want to be real flashy you can also control the look and feel of the folder too for that over the top branded file delivery ;)

You just create a new DMG on your computer open it up and then save your files into it before cosing it again.

Brilliant.

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