Making Mac ISO Bootable DVD/CD from Apple DMG Files

(Last Revision 14072007)

Background Information

Basically I wrote this document how to create a Boot DVD/CD from a Apple Specific DMG file without any special propriety burning software like Toast. This would also apply to DMG files made available by Apple for Tiger / Leopard OS and it makes it even harder when your Mac doesn’t have a Dual Layer DVD Burner.

Requirements

I’m assuming you have a bootable DMG file like Tiger / Leopard OS DMG, you have a Mac System running Mac OSX and you have access to a PC/Mac system which can burn ISO images.

Instructions

1.) Locate and copy the DMG file somewhere onto the Mac OSX System ie lets say I copied it to /tmp/image.dmg

2.) Convert the DMG file to standard ISO burning file with Mac OSX own command line utilities. Lets say we want to output the file to /tmp/image.iso, we would run a terminal and type “hdiutil convert /tmp/image.dmg –format UDTO –o /tmp/image.iso

3.) The resulting file that will be generated with an appended .cdr, ie in this case /tmp/image.iso.cdr which will take several minutes to generate but please note it is just a standard ISO image. So just rename the image.iso.cdr to image.iso.

4.) Transfer the /tmp/image.iso to a machine which can burn standard ISO images. Ie if its Windows you can use imgburn (Which is free which you can get from here http://www.imgburn.com/ which I highly recommend) or Nero Burning Rom (Shareware 30 days www.nero.com)