A Disk Utility Image Restore Question

I like to create a bootable partition on my external firewire HD and then restore my bootable utility disks to it, so that I have access to all of them without using the actual disks.
I'm curious if there is a better way of doing it than I am using now. Currently, I use drive genius to make as small a partition as possible (because disk utility seems unable to partition this external HD at all anymore) and then restore the image to that partition, but this always leaves partitions that are much bigger than they need to be.
Is there any way to have disk utility create a partition that is the same size as the image I want to restore from? Putting a 2GB bootable disk on a 2GB partition, or a 600MB disk on a 600MB partition? It just seems silly to have a 600MB disk on a 5GB partition.

Eehatu wrote:
I like to create a bootable partition on my external firewire HD and then restore my bootable utility disks to it, so that I have access to all of them without using the actual disks.
I'm curious if there is a better way of doing it than I am using now. Currently, I use drive genius to make as small a partition as possible (because disk utility seems unable to partition this external HD at all anymore)
then something is wrong with your drive or it has the wrong partition scheme. I would reformat it completely with disk utility. make sure that the partition scheme you use is GUID.
and then restore the image to that partition, but this always leaves partitions that are much bigger than they need to be.
Is there any way to have disk utility create a partition that is the same size as the image I want to restore from? Putting a 2GB bootable disk on a 2GB partition, or a 600MB disk on a 600MB partition? It just seems silly to have a 600MB disk on a 5GB partition.
I believe 1 Gb is the smallest partition size you can possibly get with disk utility. If GUI disk Utility won't make a partition small enough you can do it from terminal using diskutil command.
I just tried using diskutil and was able to reduce the size of a partition on one of my drives to 1GB although it did not want to do it in one step. I first had to reduce it to 10GB then to 5GB and then to 1GB.
enter
man diskutil
for command usage

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Using Disk Utility To Restore

Last month I did a Disk Restore onto my large external hard drive using Disk Utility.
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Henri
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Disk Utility->Help->Restoring files from a disk or disk image
You can choose to erase the destination disk and then have the disk image copied to it. Alternatively, you can choose not to erase the disk and add the disk image information to the current contents of the destination disk.
As I read this, if you don't erase the previous copy, when your restore, everything that's on the source will overwrite similarly named items on the destination. You cannot do incremental updates using DU's restroe function. For that, you need something like Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper!, etc.

Hi, I have a hard disk failure so to recover my data I am using disk utility to restore the data on an external drive while booting from a second external hard drive. When I perform the operation it gives me an input/output error and stops. Any tips?

Hi, I have a hard disk failure so to recover my data I am using disk utility to restore the data on an external drive while booting from a second external hard drive. When I perform the operation and after having selected both my destination and source drives, the operation begins but soon fails due to input/output error. If I try to create an image of the drive it gives me the same error message. Any help would be much appreciated.

Disk Utility only creates a image of the drive, so it's no help getting exactly what you want, which is your files. If the file structure is messed up or the drive is failing then it's no help.
If you have a external boot drive and you can't access the internal non-booting drive though the typical Finder and windows to transfer your files via drag and drop methods, then you need to install Data Rescue on the external boot drive and it will do as best as it can to recover your files. (works on non-encrypted/non-Filevaulted drives only)
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https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents#/

Can't drag disk icon in Disk Utility to restore backup image

I'm restoring my MacBook from a backup image I made on my external HD with SuperDuper! and I've run into a big problem. I've booted from my OS X CD. I'm in Disk Utility, and while my external drive mounts and I can select the image in the 'restore' pane, I can't for the life of me drag any icon to the 'destination' field. Any help with this?

Hi
I have exactly the same problem,i backed up my internal HD, and want to restore it by starting my mac mini intel single core with the original delivered os dvd including diskutilities.But no way it is not possible to drag a volume or partition to the required field to the left.I called apple support and the guy did not understand what I'm talking about at all, and told me he will forward to the developer dep.
Never mind, I recovered the mac mini intel with ccc , thanks God I did an image backup and a ccc !
Yesterday my mac mini intel audio hardware has broken, so I have to do another bkp with booted up os dvd to bring in to a serviceprovider.
Tried to recover for security issues , but disk utilitiy did not work again , no drag 'n' drop possible - this problem never exists under powermac before and its driving me mad under intel macs
I did a trick to show thats it is definitely the revision of this os dvd and disk utilities (x86 intel rev.)
I did a clean install form this os dvd, then cloned the interal harddisk to a external firewire disk making it bootable (using ccc for all)
I did no software update just clean from the dvd, restarted , choosed external firewire harddisk, et voila - opened disk utilitiy to restore dmg image for the internal hd and drag 'n' drop works without problems!!
Resumee:
my delivered os dvd 10.4.5 AHT vesrion 3A102 disc version 1.0 2Z691-5738-A has the biggest bug of all, it can not recover a backed up image at all - that is a revision e.g. release bug (error).
I will have to return this dvd !
Greetings Tobias

Using Disk Utility to restore an image stored on the network

Hello --
I have a disk image, Image.dmg. When I boot from the 10.4 installer DVD, Disk utility is able to restore this image from a firewire drive to an internal drive.
Image.dmg is also on a network share, hosted via AFP. When I boot from the 10.4 installer DVD, select "Restore," and specify that share as the source:
afp://172.28.40.XX/Image_Share/Image.dmg
I get this message:
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Any ideas?

Can't really tell if you are trying to restore an image from a locally attached firewire drive or (as from the original poster of the message) from a remotely shared location. If you are restoring from a remote share location then have you tried:
afp://username:[email protected]/Image_Share/Image.dmg
Replacing username and password with the account information which has access to that remote share location.
Good luck,
TK

Problems with Disk Utility backup & restore via DMG disk images

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OWC2TB.dmg (1.1TB)
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The next attempt to imagescan the DMG got further than the "insufficient space" error. It displayed "Scanning image OWC2TB.dmg, Block Checksum Partition #1". This ran for about 10 hours. At the end, it displayed a new error message "Unable to scan OWC2TB.dmg (internal error)".
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I think the problem might be the fact the DMG is split in two parts, but the imagescan/restore software does not know how to read the second part? Is there a way to join these into a single DMG?

I attempted to backup and restore a 2TB external raid storage device using the recommended Disk Utility procedure for 10.6.6. One of the HDDs in the raid enclosure had started to fail.
First step was to create a new image from the 2TB device. I accepted the defaults of compressed image format and no encryption. The image took about 15 hours to create, and when complete, I was left with 2 files:
OWC2TB.dmg (1.1TB)
OWC2TB.002.dmgpart (486GB).
To check the DMG I ran the Disk Utility "Verify Disk" on the DMG, and got the message "The volume OWC2TB appears to be OK". The DMG is described in DU as:
Description: Apple UDIF read-only compressed (zlib)
Connection Bus: Disk Image
Total Capacity: 2 TB
Disk Write Status: Read Only
Partition Map Scheme: No partition map
I then replaced the failing HDD in the enclosure, recreated a new 2TB filesystem on the device, and attempted to restore from the DMG image.
The first attempt was to use Disk Utility "Restore" function. I specified the DMG as the source and the new device as the destination, and chose "Erase Destination". This failed immediately with the error "Restore failure. Could not find any scan information. The source images needs to be imagescanned before it can be restored".
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Can anyone suggest what I can try next to restore the DMG?
I think the problem might be the fact the DMG is split in two parts, but the imagescan/restore software does not know how to read the second part? Is there a way to join these into a single DMG?

Using Disk Utility to restore/copy disk - who is correct?

I had two long talks with two separate Apple Care people online today who both insisted what they were saying was right and the other person was wrong.
Hmm....
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I have a MBP and the internal HD is currently empty. I've been running off of an external HD for about a year now.
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doug
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The advantage is CCC has built in routines that "bless" (see the Terminal.app command "bless") the
os x installation so it will boot properly on the new volume it is being installed on.
Disk Utility simply copies (restores) files from one volume to another. Many times this works just fine.
Sometimes it won't boot afterwards. Most of the time (as long as there are no system files missing
or corrupted) a person may "bless" the drive and restore it to working condition.
CCC is not a "magical" application, it is in fact a front end to applications that already exist separately
in OS X (asr, hdiutil, diskutil, bless, etc.).
It doesn't matter to me how you do it. It's your time not mine. Everyone should spend some time
behind the command line in terminal. I do many tasks using the command line, including and not
limited to complete system restores, backing up data, disk partitioning, installing software, disk
repair, permissions repair, ACL management, restoring data, managing disk images, network
management, user management, file management, etc. Many people are fearful of the command
line. I feel just the opposite, I'm fearful without it.
Say Hello to my little friend.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/enUS/Command_Line_Adminv10.5.pdf
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unixopensource/clix.html
http://www.macobserver.com/tips/macosxcl101/index.html
http://www.matisse.net/OSX/darwin_commands.html
Kj

Disk Utility Images of Mac OS, Linux and Windows?

Quick questions: am I able to use Disk Utility to make an image of a Windows partition that is NTFS? And, be able to restore it back if I need to? Same goes for the Linux: can I make an image of an ext3 partition, then restore it if need be?

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Moutain Lion Time Machine Backup To WHS 2011 Via Disk Utility Image On Windows Share?

I read that with Lion you could do a Time Machine backup to a network share on Windows Home Server 2011. I read you could create a image file via Disk Utility that would be placed on the network share, but mounted as a regular disk in Mac. I think I read this method no longer works on Moutain Lion though. Has anyone tried it? I'm setting up a new Mac Mini and would like to do time machine backups to my WHS 2011 drivepool. If it is possible great, any way to use the backup for bare metal restores as well? (ether across the network, or putting that image file on a usb drive first etc) I use bootcamp to go back and forth on my Mac Mini, but I'd like to keep things backed up on the Mac side via standard time machine.

I re-googled and found something I read about a few days ago that shows how it was done in Lion:
http://basilsalad.com/how-to/create-time-machine-backup-network-drive-lion/
I think maybe I found someone that tells how to do it:
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Disk Utility Image backup - 8 hours and counting. ?

So I'm doing a backup image in Disk Utility. Started up from the install DVD 10.6 and went into D U and making an image of my Macbook's (2008) HD (250gb) and saving it to a WD usb 2.0 external drive. I'm going on 8 hours. I know it takes a while but I swear my iBook from 2002 is faster on USB 1.0 . Is this normal? I feel like I would have been better off putting it in Target Disk Mode and used another Mac to back it up instead. I want all my data after the restore so I thought the image was the best way to go. This can't be the fastest way. Would this go any faster on FireWire? I know the file transfer itself can't take 8 hours can it? I'm miffed. Any advice?
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Thomas A Reed wrote:
+_Also, why did you boot from the install disk? That is absolutely not necessary. I'd also absolutely, 100% recommend against using disk images for backup. Large disk images are too easy to corrupt, which will cause you to lose everything they contain. They're just not good enough for backups. Use [Carbon Copy Cloner|http://www.bombich.com> or SuperDuper instead...+_
I was following Apple's instructions http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1553
I had it backed up in SuperDuper and Time Machine as well. I knew I could get all of my data with an image and I've never used SD for importing data, only whole disk images.
_+You didn't say how full your hard drive is. If your drive isn't anywhere near capacity, it shouldn't be taking that long. If it is too close to capacity, that could be part of the problem.+_
Yeah, I was at 240/250gb. I didn't think about that. Thats also good to know.
The external 1TB WD USB2 drive I used was the same drive that a few months back I transferred 900+ gigs to from my W7 computer with a esata drive. (1tb WD usb2 to esata 1tb through my W7 PC). While I know the esata is super fast, that WD 1TB USB2 drive "was" fast (35 - 50 sustained speed?) and it took maybe six hours for 900+gb. Thats why I'm confused.
All in all I really don't care if it takes that long if I know that ahead of time. It's one thing to hit a button and go to sleep, but another to get it done ASAP because it's 5am and I should have been done by midnight at the latest. I need to use it all day today.
Thanks guys.
Message was edited by: dtommyd2

Disk Utility / Net Restore: "You must authenticate in order to restore".

Hi,
maybe someone can help me: I would like to install an image which was made by Bombichs NetRestore-Helper to an over Netboot bootet Imac. Every time I press the restore-button in the disk utility, I get the same Message: "You must authenticate in order to restore".
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Florian
OS X Server 10.4.
Dual 2.3 Ghz PowerPC G5 Mac OS X (10.4.9)
Dual 2.3 Ghz PowerPC G5 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Hi,
Thanks for replying; I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this issue. I recall using firewire to connect my iPod to my G4 Powerbook back in '03-'04. Unfortunately, I lost the original cables after two moves (I'm in the military), so I bought the ReTrak cables which included both USB 2.0 and FW. My FW port is fine because I have a 300 GB FW external hard drive attached to my iMac, and it works. What's strange is that before I tried to update it, the iPod worked fine when connected via USB 2.0. Once I tried updating it, the update froze up and my iPod displayed an . As explained in my first post, I've exhausted all efforts to get this thing working again. I appreciate everyone's responses. Fourth, please let me know if you find any fixes.
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Disk Utility - Is "Restore" also a backup?

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Disk Utility to Restore

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Where did you store the image?

Disk Utility image disk doesn't work

Disk Utility doesn't help
Hi there!
I try to install the os x mavericks update on a Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Mac from the Apple page. A message told me there was an error on the disk so I tried to repair it with Disk Utility. It didn't work. It ask me to make an image copy, It doesn't work neither. I am not able to go back or forward from there.
There was a message coming up telling me "cannot allocate memory".
I wrongly supposed it was a external hard disk problem so I bought a 3TB hard disc to make an image disc copy but again it didn't work.
I try to use Disk Utility to repair or make an image copy of the Macintosh (running from my Mac or the Install DVD) but it cannot repair the hard drive or make a disk image. Depending on the options I choose messages like: "input/output error" or "cannot allocate memory".. keep coming up. I don't know what to do any longer.
Before going forward I want to save my all my data.
Can you help me please?

Step one is to erase and reformat the 3 TB HD you bought. Ensure that it's Mac OS Extended with the GUID option. Next, use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to put a bootable backup/clone onto the ext HD. Ensure that you can boot the machine with it. Boot into the backup/clone, launch Disk Utility and repair the int HD. If successful, update it to 10.6.8. Boot with the int HD and update the clone. Once that's finished, try upgrading either it or the clone to Mavericks.
iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), SL & ML, G4 450 MP w/Leopard, 9.2.2

Why does good disk utility image generate error message?

I created a disk image of a data cd using disk utility. When I open the dmg file I get the message:
"The disk image you are opening may be damaged and could damage you system. Are you sure you want to open this image?"
When I open the image there are no issues and the content is correct. Why is this message being generated and what can I do to keep it from happening?

Hi Burkely,
"The disk image you are opening may be damaged and could damage you system. Are you sure you want to open this image?"
This is a standard message ...
Dimaxum

A Disk Utility Image Restore Question

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