Mac OS X: Best Way to Make an ISO from a CD or DVD

http://superuser.com/questions/85987/mac-os-x-best-way-to-make-an-iso-from-a-cd-or-dvd

Mac OS X: Best Way to Make an ISO from a CD or DVD

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Both command-line and screen-oriented pointers appreciated! update: I verified the disk utility, hdiutil, and dd methods. dd seems the fastest, 30 minutes on my macbook pro vs. 40 minutes for hdiutil. I was able to simplify dd to use just if= and of= For DVD, I used /dev/disk2. I unmounted it first $ sudo umount /dev/disk2 $ dd if=/dev/disk2 of=mydisk.iso osx  mac  iso-image link | improve this question asked  Jun 29 '09 at 0:00 community wiki Mark Harrison

Yeah dd is the fastest, it is the disk druid, after all! :) –  msanford  Nov 30 '10 at 21:46   why did you unmount disk2? I thought you need to leave the DVD drive mounted, so you can read the data from it? –  Pure.Krome  Jan 11 '11 at 22:55 1   @Pure.Krome, for this purpose, /dev/disk2 is a file of several GB length. The directory structure is embedded in those bytes. IIRC, I had to umount in order to read /dev/disk2. –  Mark Harrison  Jan 12 '11 at 21:15 feedback

migrated from serverfault.com Dec 21 '09 at 7:59

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There are generally three ways to create a disk image on an OS X box: Disk Utility - The on-screen prompts will guide you, but it will by default create a .dmg, which is an OS X-specific file format. Disk Utility will also create an ISO (.cdr extension) if you select the "CD/DVD Master" option before creation the image. Rename the extension (to .iso) after creation if needed. Roxio Toast - The de facto third-party standard in creating optical media on Mac OS for over a decade, it will create almost any CD or DVD format you want. The hdutil command-line utility, which will, in fact, create every format that Toast supports, for free, though it is far less pretty. If you want to create an ISO with this tool, use hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o Image.iso /input_path There is a fourth, extremely direct command-line way using dd that sysadmins might know: dd if=/dev/disk1 of=Image.iso link | improve this answer edited  Mar 28 at 22:35 community wiki 3 revs, 3 users 89% msanford

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