Convert DVD to ISO on Mac
Another faculty member asked me how to convert a DVD to an ISO on his Mac. Here are the instructions for everybody.
He needed to convert it because he wanted to deploy it on a Netbook from a USB drive. We all know you shouldn’t do this unless you’ve paid for the license and are only installing it on a single machine, like the Adobe license specifies.
The only tricky part to this is the last command-line step, which I borrowed from Mac OS X hints.
1. Open Disk Utility on your Mac OS X. It’ll look something like this:
2. Click the New Image icon in the tool bar, and save it as a compressed file. This writes it as a .dmg file, which is an Apple format .iso file.
It’ll take a while to write. The length of time is relevant to the size of the image on the DVD.
3. This is the first of two tricky steps. They’re tricky because you need to use the command-line. If you followed the instructions, you’ve saved the .dmg file on the Desktop. Now, you need to convert the .dmg formatted file to an .iso formatted file. You open Terminal, which is found in your Applications folder. Once launched follow the steps below. Change the directory to the Desktop or the folder where you put the file. You must do this before running this command because I’ve used relative file syntax (more or less only the file name). Alternatively, you could provide fully qualified file names.
MacPro:~ mclaughlinm$ cd Desktop MacPro:Desktop mclaughlinm$ ls *.dmg Acrobat9.dmg MacPro:Desktop mclaughlinm$ hdiutil convert Acrobat9.dmg -format UDTO -o Acrobat9.iso Reading Acrobat9 (Apple_ISO : 0)… ............................................................................................................... Elapsed Time: 27.655s Speed: 22.2Mbytes/sec Savings: 0.0% created: /Users/mclaughlinm/Desktop/Acrobat9.iso.cdr |
4. Before you copy it to your Windows USB, you need to remove the trailing .cdr from the file name. The syntax at the command-line is:
MacPro:Desktop mclaughlin$ mv Acrobat9.iso.cdr Acrobat9.iso |
5. Open Finder, and copy the .iso to your USB drive, and delete the temporary copy.
Hope this helps some folks.
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“You open Terminal, and change the directory to the Desktop or where you put the file. You must do this before running this command because I’ve used relative file syntax. ”
thanks for trying to help us non tech types but that last line might have well been in japanese. anyone who needs to look up how to do these things will probably need it explained. we are mac users for god sake!
henry
27 Jul 10 at 1:11 pm
I’ve updated it. Hopefully, that helps fill any gap. The problem is users can put the file in any folder and the syntax for folders with white spaces is more complex.
maclochlainn
27 Jul 10 at 4:13 pm
I’m horrified to read Henry’s comment. I’m a mac user which is – as you might know – UNIX. This indeed why it was called Mac OS X rather than simply Mac OS 10.
I would rather expect such a comment from a GUI-only user.
Olivier
steinweo
21 Oct 10 at 1:57 pm
Thank you very much from Japan!
kani
4 Dec 10 at 8:27 pm
If you drag the .dmg icon from the finder into terminal it will enter the fully qualified name for you. That makes this even easier.
Brian
4 Mar 11 at 11:41 am
Great instructions. Too bad the ISO conversion wasn’t just built into Disk Utility. It’s nice to know that there’s a command line workaround and no need to hunt for additional software. Thanks for sharing!
K
26 Mar 11 at 4:20 pm
Excellent advice. Thanks V Much
Doug
30 May 11 at 11:12 am
In Lion, I notice that one of the options under “Image Format” is “CD/DVD Master”. This sounds like an ISO to me, although the output file is simply .cdr.
I am going to give this a try, renaming it to .iso after the extract completes. I will let you know if this seems to work.
I am using it to create a Windows 7 Boot disk for installing Win7 under BootCamp. BC4 wants an ISO to do this.
And why do I want to use BC in the first place?
Unfortunately, some critical software of which I have just purchased a Mac version does not work on Lion and, as this is a new-hardware Mac Mini, I can’t go backwards to Snow Leopard. Fortunately, I do have a Windows equivalent that *should* work under BootCamp / Win7. (MediaShout – for anyone who is interested).
Paul (Aussie)
29 Jul 11 at 10:48 pm
Yep – seems to be correct. Renamed the .cdr file to .iso and pointed Boot Camp Assistant at it, and it just got busy doing things.
Seems that someone at Apple was listening…
Paul (Aussie)
29 Jul 11 at 10:55 pm
Awesome find. Thanks for the update.
maclochlainn
29 Jul 11 at 11:29 pm
It does the same under Snow Leopard too! i.e. what Paul (Aussie) says in both of his posts.
Thx heaps to you all!
SO you no longer need the “Tricky steps”
Andrew (Aussie)
17 Nov 11 at 6:30 pm
Thanks a lot. I don’t know what I did…but I did it!
Is it correct that the dmg file is smaller than the iso file (3.62 GB -> 3.92 GB)?
Francesco (from Switzerland)
16 Jan 12 at 12:07 pm
If you have no problem reading the file, then it’s fine. It’s possible that you’re looking at a measurement where 1,024 is measured as 1,000 versus on the CD it’s measured against the 1,024.
maclochlainn
16 Jan 12 at 10:30 pm
Thanks to all.
I converted to iso but I cant delete ei.cfg . any suggestion please .
alen
17 Jun 12 at 1:35 am
thanks !
manu
6 Jul 12 at 10:06 am
Thank you very much. It was very helpful
Nader
23 Aug 12 at 7:33 pm
This worked beautifully on ML. Thanks so much!!
james1052
23 Nov 12 at 8:46 pm
Thank you very much, I appreciate you are the best.
Pat
6 Dec 12 at 5:39 pm
Very good posting, first in Google and solves the problem!!!
Thank you very much.
Manoj
22 Dec 12 at 2:18 am
thank you so much from HK
kit
6 Jan 13 at 10:19 pm
it’s working very well.
thank you very much from korea.
kim
26 Apr 13 at 12:38 am
You can actually drag and drop the file to the terminal and it will automatically generate the path to it. That way you can save a step.
Alfredo
12 May 13 at 3:51 pm