MacLochlainns Weblog

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.