This guide covers the verbatim copying of a DMG image to a USB thumb drive using only Linux (no need to find a Mac). If the DMG was intended to be bootable then the resulting USB will be bootable.
Convert to ISO
Itunes 10.7 Mac Dmg Burn Mac Os X Dmg To Usb In Windows Dmg Mori Ctx Alpha 300 Dmg Mori Jobs Davis Ca Installesd.dmg To Bootable Usb Best Dmg Classes In Wow Beta Currently Winzip Mac Edition 50.dmg Mac Dmg To Usb Terminal Download Mac Os X Install Disk Dmg. Change Password On Mac Os X Dmg With Terminal Run Dmg File From Command Line Windows Burn Dmg To Usb Convert Macos Installer To Dmg Mac Os Boot Drive Usb Dmg Lion On Sierra Download Itunes 10.7 Dmg Opening Dmg Files On Linux Mac Os X El Capitan Dmg File How Do Magsorcs Get Such High Spell Dmg.
Linux doesn’t much care for DMG files. Sure, it’ll play nice with them. But we don’t just want to play nice. We want to copy a DMG image to a USB drive and keep it as verbatim as computationally possible. In order to do this, we’re first going to convert the image to a format that’s a little more universal: ISO.
We’re going to use dmg2img to convert the DMG to an ISO image. If you already have dmg2img, great. If not, install it using your distribution’s native package management system.
For example, if you want to burn a DMG file to USB on a Mac, it’s as easy as using the built-in Disk Utility tool. On Linux and Windows, you obviously have to use other ways. Step 3 Create Bootable USB from macOS Install Image Click “Load DMG” to import your DMG file into the program. Bootable USB Installers for OS X Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra. First, review this introductory article: Create a bootable installer for macOS. Second, see this How To outline for creating a bootable El Capitan installer. Simply replace the Terminal command with the one from the preceding article by copying it into the Terminal.
On Ubuntu, you’d do it like this:
Once you have dmg2img installed, begin converting the DMG file:
After a few minutes, you should have a second file called image.img. This file can be used like an ISO. All we have to do is change the extension. Use mv to do this:
Make sure you specified “image.img” and not “image.dmg”! Working with three different file extensions can get kind of confusing.
Ok, so we should now have a file called “image.iso” which is just “image.img” with a different extension.
Now we want to write “image.iso” to our USB drive. I used “lsblk” to figure out how the system was identifying my drive. The lsblk command lists all disks connected to the system. It’s usually pretty easy to figure out which disk is which based on their size. Just be sure you’re sure. This process is going to overwrite the target disk with the contents of our DMG image file. Any preexisting files on the target disk will be lost. As usual, make sure you have a proper backup.
Make sure the target drive isn’t mounted. Unmount the drive with your distribution’s GUI.
Or you could just unmount it from the terminal:
Most systems seem to mount external drives in /media. Sometimes the drive might be mounted in /mnt or elsewhere.
Write the ISO image to the USB drive like this:
Mac Dmg To Iso
Replace “X” with the appropriate letter. For example “/dev/sdb”. Be sure to use the drive directly and not a partition within the drive. For example, don’t use “/dev/sdb1”.
Burn Dmg To Usb Mac Terminal Tool
This will probably take a little while to complete. I’m using a Kingston DataTraveler DTSE9 and it took about 24 minutes 30 seconds to write 4.9GB.
Your new USB stick should now be bootable, assuming that was the intended purpose of the DMG.
| Click here to return to the 'Restore a full-disk .dmg file to a raw block device' hint |
Wow, great hint. This is going to go to good use. Thanks!
Somehow I thought that was what the menu item Images -> Scan Image for Restore always did... but I suppose there has been at least one occasion where this may have actually been what I needed.
g=
Happily, I've never found myself in a position where I needed to restore my backup image files, (made with Carbon Copy Cloner.) But I'd like to know the routine if I ever need to use it.
My question: since I back up separate partitions into separate disk image files, is this hint inapplicable to me? Does this hint only apply to backing up multiple partitions into a single disk image?
(I had no idea it was even possible to backup multiple partitions to a single disk image...)
This is great. I was getting real frustrated with Disk Utility's non-specific error messages. This worked just like you said it would.
Great post. However, when I tried this I got a 'Resource busy' error.
In order to avoid this problem, you have to make sure the mac OS isn't 'using' the device first. To do this just open the DiskUtility.app, and on the target USB hard drive, unmount any of it's partitions. Make sure to not eject the USB hard drive so that the device is still available in DiskUtility and shows up in the result from 'diskutil list'.
Many thanks to you and daveosborne for your hints !
1) I'm currently dumping the content of a .dmg file to an external disk.
2) 'with an appropriate buffer size to copy over the whole block image, including partition table and boot sector'
-> what do you mean by that and how can I determine which buffer size is appropriate ?
-> how did you determine the 131072 size ?
For my use I trusted blindly the example and used the bs=131072 option. Untill now it seems to be working... (it's still copying).
I'm currenlty getting tons of lines on my terminal screen that look like :
...
CZlibDecompressor::decompressData: src 0x02E4AA97 srcLen 116073
CZlibDecompressor::decompressData: dest 0x02E26000 destLen 262144
CZlibDecompressor::decompressData: src 0x02E61F0D srcLen 20723
CZlibDecompressor::decompressData: dest 0x02E26000 destLen 262144
...
with sometimes long series of
...
CZlibDecompressor::decompressData: src 0x02E66B71 srcLen 1167
CZlibDecompressor::decompressData: dest 0x02E26000 destLen 262144
CZlibDecompressor::decompressData: src 0x02E66B71 srcLen 1167
CZlibDecompressor::decompressData: dest 0x02E26000 destLen 262144
...
I notice the destLen (I suppose it means block destination length) 262144 is exactly the double of the bs=131072 that was used before. I'm curious if anyone can help me understand this. Does this mean the source data is sparsed over the destination disk by blocks of 131072 or 262144 bytes, thereby fragmenting the disk ?
In your replies, please kindly take into account that I'm a French newbie with a fair level of ignorance of OSX command line technical slang, however not completely ignorant with computers either (one piece of paper even says I'm an engineer :), it's just that I don't understand what the buffer size technically means here.
Many thanks in advance for your insights !