Trying to create HD disk image on external drive

I'm trying to use the disc utility to create a disk image of my HD, saved to an external drive (500 GB, My Book) via FireWire. After choosing the appropriate origin and destination info on the drop-down menus, and clicking Save, I get a dialogue box that for an instant shows the operation in progress, then reverts to: Unable to save DMG, resources busy. I might not have the exact words, but it's very close.
What am I doing wrong? What resource is "busy", the HD or the external? The dialogue box doesn't indicate that info. I'm not aware of any obvious conflicts. No other applications are running.

Were you trying to copy the Mac OS volume?
I think the OS itself is a big program that is running. So somehow the source is changing every minuets. You may try SuperDuper! or Carbon copy cloner to do what you want, both of which are free, at least some of the main functions are. They should have no problem when dealing with the OS that is currently running.

Similar Messages

Trying to create encrypted disc image on external drive

Hi,
I'm trying to create a 10Gig encrypted disc image on an almost empty 2Tb external HD. I go through the usual steps using disc image. But about 1/4 of the way through "creating image" it stops, saying "file too large". Why is this, and is there a way around it.
Richard

Oops. I've just realized that the external HD is formatted as FAT32, so that explains it.
Richard

Disk Utility Error 61 when attempting to create disk image on external driv

I would like to make occasional archive backups of my three macintosh computers. I bought a new Western Digital 2TB drive for this purpose, and formatted it as Mac OS Extended. Trying to do a disk image backup using Disk Utility, I follow the directions:
- Startup from an install DVD.
- Start Disk Utilities and select "Restore"
- Drag "Macintosh HD" into the Source box
- Click on "New Image" and select compressed and 128-bit AES encryption
This leads to the error message: Unable to create "....." (error -61)
I have enocountered this problem both with my iMac G5 and a MacBook, both running Leopard.
Does anyone know what this error means, what I am doing wrong, and/or if there is another way to create disk image backups? Help!

1. For reasons I don't know disc images seem to become more fragile the larger they get. They also can be subject to file corruption that affects the entire disc image, whereas file corruption on a clone would only affect certain files.
2. You cannot put multiple clones on the same volume. Each clone must be on a separate volume, but you can have multiple volumes on a single drive simply by partitioning the drive accordingly. Of course you need a drive large enough to accommodate each clone. Each clone should be to a space equal to the capacity of the cloned drive.
3. I'm not a big fan of TM, although I must confess it has become more reliable since it's release, especially with Snow Leopard. However, there are many backup utilities that can create clones, perform incremental updates, and archive changed files. See the following:
Backup Software Recommendations
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
Silver Keeper
MimMac
Retrospect
Super Flexible File Synchronizer
SuperDuper!
Synchronize Pro! X
Synk Pro
Synk Standard
Tri-Backup
Others may be found at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.

Cannot remove Disk Icons from Disk Images or External Drives from Desktop

After years with PPCs, I just upgraded to an Intel Mac. I am now running into a funny problem. The majority of the time (although occasionally it works as it should), I am unable to eject disks. These include disk images from my internal hard drive, external hard drives, and disk images from external hard drives.
I do not get the “Cannot eject this disk because it is in use” error that happens when something is trying to access a file on the disk; instead, nothing happens. I’ve tried ejecting by dragging the icon to the dock, hitting the eject icon in finder, right-clicking and ejecting from there, and even using a terminal-based script that I found on the WEB. None of these do anything- no errors, but the icon hangs about as if nothing happened.
Occasionally I cannot log off at all (I just get the SBBOD); here I have to do a hard reboot. Sometimes I can log off properly. Either way, all seems to be fine when I log back in.
I’ve run Applejack multiple times.
Any suggestions would be most appreciated! Thank you.
OS 10.5.6
2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo iMac with 2 GB factory RAM

The linked macfixitforums topic is over seven years old and isn't applicable. Follow nerowolfe's suggestions. Once you sort things out, see these:
Switching from Windows to Mac OS X,
Basic Tutorials on using a Mac,
MacFixIt Tutorials,
MacTips, and
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition.
Additionally, *Texas Mac Man* recommends:
Quick Assist.
Welcome to the Switch To A Mac Guides,
Take Control E-books, and
A guide for switching to a Mac.

Trying To Create Encrypted Disk Images With Disk Utility.

I am trying to create encrypted read and write Disk Images of around 2 GB to 6 GB with Disk Utility.
More often than not the dmg is NOT encrypted.
It seems very hit and miss . . . . most of the time missing!
Is this process notoriously unreliable or am I likely to be doing something wrong?

I think you have cracked it Niel!
I made another, unchecking the Keychain box, and it worked perfectly.
I have been using a password which is used for other items.
Now the .dmg has been created can I check the Keychain box and if so what are the benefits?
I have never understood what the Keychain does.

Disk Images and External Drives - PLEASE HELP

Hi all,
I've got to a point where i can't afford to keep buying expensive drives to work form with Final Cut Pro X so decided to just work from several high spec drives and then back them up on other cheaper drives, reformat the high spec ones and start again.
Not really understanding how disk imaging works I hoped I could carbon copy mountable and read and writeable drives (in this case a thunderbolt lace SSD) on to a cheaper mass storage, wipe it and start again. I hoped it would then appear on the drives top level just as the drive appears on my desktop, and that I could access it if needed or port it back to a single drive at a later date? Is this possible? Can anyone help? So far everything I've tried has failed.
One thought I did have was to create several partitions on the cheaper mass drive and duplicate it on to there? But I can't find any help or instruction for this online and need to make sure its write before I go deleting old projects.
Attached are a picture of what I have (the disk image file) and what I was hoping to create (a mountable replica of a working drive on an external HD)
Any help greatly appreciated.
Robin

You can research the terms disk image and back up for several hours. That might not help.
None of the back up routines I am aware for for video and large media files use any compression or bundling systems like .dmg. I think your best bet is to make one-to-one copies of your files to your cheap drives. If you need the older projects, you copy them back to your working drives. That's pretty much how it's always been unless you are have a nice NAS RAID with mirroring to another rack of drives.
The problem with cheap mass storage is no that it's unreliable. It's just not QUITE as reliable as more expensive systems. Having a copy of your work on a disk that might or is likely to fail is almost the same as not having a backup at all. but there is a point of diminishing returns for all of us in this business. This trend toward 4k and 8k, and FCPX's inability to manage media efficiently, means we all must add TB of storage for every project. A friend of mine includes a couple of TB drives in his fees. The client pays for and gets the drives.

Setting up sparse disk image on external drive

I am trying to set up an sparse disk image on an external drive and I am not getting the standard screen that I have seen referenced. My only options to select are image format and encryption, not image size, etc. I have the external drive formatted as Mas OS extended. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Open Disk Utility > File > New >Blank Disk Image...
or use the "Option-⌘-N" Key combo (with Disk Utlity open).
Kj

Encrypted disk image on external drive prevents that drive from ejecting

I've tested this a few different ways, and it seems to be a rather consistent problem.
I have an external USB hard drive (seagate) and on that drive I use encrypted disk images to store my data.
(because it's a portable drive, I'm nervous I'll lose it and then someone will have access to my stuff).
So anyway, whenever I mount the sparse bundle disk image, when it comes time to eject the drive (after ejecting the disk image of course), it hangs for a while and then the Finder says it can't eject, but that I can Force Eject the drive. When I chose to Force Eject, it works, but I don't like having to force it every time.
Anyone know what's up?
Thanks,
Brian.,

Open Disk Utility > File > New >Blank Disk Image...
or use the "Option-⌘-N" Key combo (with Disk Utlity open).
Kj

How to create a disk image for flash drive backup

I tried to follow the instructions here – http://www.apple.com/uk/pro/tips/lockyourdata.html – without success. How do I encrypt the contents of my memory stick?

There is another way to do this if you are a bit adventurous: the terminal. I don't have a lot of experience using the terminal for this, but I just tried it, and it worked, and very quickly (a few seconds to create a 5 gig sparse image). The "terminal" is in utilities, and gives you access to the UNIX underpinnings of os x. OS X is essentially a GUI for UNIX. If you decide to try this, be very careful, and enter the commands exactly as written.
1. make sure you have a backup of your folder that you want to encrypt.
2. a backup of your whole system wouldn't be a bad idea either
3. open terminal (applications> utilities)
4. select the following line:
hdiutil create -encryption -size 5g -type SPARSE -fs HFS+ -volname Image ~/Desktop/image
6. Do not select any spaces before the first "h" or after the last "e".
6.5 do command-C to copy what you just selected.
7. go back to terminal. You should see something like this:
arthurs-mac-mini:~ arthur$ (and then a little grey square)
8. In my case, the "arthurs-mac-mini" is the name of my computer, and the "arthur$" is the user account currently logged in. the grey square is like the cursor.
9. paste the line you copied and hit return
10. it should prompt you twice to enter a password. enter it and hit return after each.
11. your new sparse image should appear on your desktop. If you like you can change the name of it from "image" to something else.
12. you can then open the image and copy your folder contents to it. The image should resize itself automatically to whatever you put in it.
13. hope this helps. let me know how it turns out.

Problems creating a disk image on an external hard drive

Hiya,
I've been trying to create a disk image on my dad's external hard drive to hold my back-ups all day with no luck. I've managed small ones, e.g. a few MB, but when trying to create images 20 or 40 GB in size (which is what I need), it isn't working.
When I've tried creating them in Disk Utility with the place to save them to as the external HD, it says "Unable to create... Illegal seek" which doesn't explain much to me! I have been successful in creating a large disk image on my own HD, but when I try to move it to the external HD, it says "Sorry the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occured (Error code -1309)."
Extra info:
- I am saving my back-ups in a disk image, as they must be password protected, so that's why I'm not just copying them over.
- There's plenty of space avaliable on the external HD, so it would seem that isn't the problem.
- The HD is a Freecom Classic SL, connected via USB cable.
Any ideas anyone?
Thanks alot,
Charity

Found the answer. It was formatted for Windows.

Can't create disk image of external disk

I just switched from a PowerBook G4 running OS 10.4, to a MacBook Pro running 10.5. I'm trying to create a disk image of the old machine's hard disk, as a backup. Before doing this, I ran Disk Utility to make sure none of my disks were in need of repair.
I started up the old machine in Target Disk mode and connected it to the new one. In Disk Utility, I selected the disk, and clicked Create Disk Image. I told it to save the disk image as uncompressed and writable, on a disk that has plenty of space. So it chugs along for about an hour, creating an 80GB image.
Then once the image is done, I try to mount it and get an error, saying that the disk image has no mountable file systems. I've done this four times already, each time with the same result. In addition, if I try to restart after creating the image, the system hangs.
Any ideas why this might be happening? Are there any known bugs with Disk Utility in Leopard? Interestingly, I tried to do the same thing with Carbon Copy Cloner, and ran into a different error (it thought that it couldn't mount the newly-created image).

Yesterday I bought a Maxtor Basic external harddrive for my mac.
Followed the instructions, using Disk Utility, formatted the hd, then I tried to create a 60 gb blank encrypted disk image but failed twice; after clicking 'Create', Disk Utility does not prompt to create a password.
First time Disk Utility just hangs; there's no respond for 30mins, so i force quit it and reformatted the drive, again.
Then I tried to create a 10mb encrypted disk image and the box appears to enter a password, so I presume it was working fine.
Again, I tired to create the 60gb blank image. This time, i left it overnight, thinking maybe it just takes a longer time. No prompt for passwords, and in the morning, the msg I got was 'No drive found' or something like that, because the drive has ejected itself. (???)
Anyone has any idea why? I could create the image on my mac and throw it in the external drive, but my mac onlyhas 15 gb of space.
Let me know if this sounds like a problem with the Maxtor so I could exchange it ASAP.

Disk utility is crashing when trying to create a new image

Seriously need some help if anyone has an idea of why disk utility is crashing while trying to create a disk image. I'm not finding any other info on this issue.
My HD is failing and being replaced tomorrow and I'm desperately trying to create disk images of both my mac HD and of bootcamp for the new drive being installed.
Any recommendations or suggestions would be truly appreciated.

Thank you for responding so quickly. I do have Carbon Copy Cloner, but if disk utility isn't working, getting it to restore is going to be an issue, though haven't attempted a restore since the HD has to be replaced.
CCC also doesn't clone bootcamp either unfortunately.
Currently running "verify permissions" using Disk Utility and so far so good, it hasn't crashed, it seems to be an issue related to imaging with disk utility.
Then I am going to attempt using the install disk to see if I can get disk utility again and try imaging Bootcamp again too.

Problem creating a disk image

Hello I'm trying to create an encrypted disk image on one of my external hard drives using the OSX Disk Utility, and am receiving the following error:
'unable to create "file Name.dmg". (no such file or directory)'
I'm creating the disk image as read/write, and with 128-bit AES encryption.
I've tried to create another disk image on my OSX HD (not an external), and still get an error, only this time:
'unable to create "file Name.dmg". (resource busy)'
Any suggestions? There is plenty of free space on both hard drives.
I'm running a Power PC G5 duel 2ghz, with OSX v 10.5.8.
Many thanks in advance...

OK it seems no one can help, so I'll try a different question;
The reason I want to create an encrypted disk image is because I've been everywhere on the 'net' and cant find out how to password protect a folder on my Mac.
This seems like something that should be very straight forward, but for the life of me I cant find what I'm looking for. Every post I read refers to creating an encrypted disk image, or playing with folder permissions - non of which actually achieve the desired result.
Surely its not that hard create a folder that requires a password to be viewed??

Disk Utility - Create encrypted disk images super sloooow

Trying to create encrypted disk images via Disk Utility on my iMac (i7 8GB) is super-slow in 10.8. It worked quite fast in 10.7, but now it's super-slow and doesn't even seem to ever finish.
I've tried re-installing 10.8 with no difference.
Anyone else having trouble with this? Even a small dmg (~200MB) doesn't seem to work.
Unencrypted images seem to work OK (if not a little slow).
I realize that the encryption process will be slower but something is definately wrong with 10.8 disk utility in this regard. I have 1TB+ free space. I have tried with another user account as well.
My task was: (new disk image, read-write, 128bit encryption)
2012-09-03 08:59:59 -0400: Initializing…
2012-09-03 09:00:00 -0400: Creating…
2012-09-03 09:03:28 -0400: Copying… <<< seems to be stuck here...

Good morning,
Have you tried using Disk Utility from within the recovery mode? (Hold down CMD and R when booting)
I used to have this problem but creating them this way really improved the time.
Give it a go...
Rob

Can a use a partitioned external hard drive to create a disk image? I tried, doesn't seem to work using disk manager.

Can a use a partitioned external hard drive to create a disk image? I tried, doesn't seem to work using disk manager.

OK, it's very bad computing to use a backup disk for anything but a backup. The reason being is if/when the HD crashes you will have lost not only all your backup but the data files. While I commend you for wanting redundant backup, you really need separate EHDs for doing so. Format each EHD using Disk Utility to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using the GUID parttition. When you connect, OS X will ask if you want to use that drive as a Time Machine backup drive, select yes and then let it backup. On the second EHD format the same way however do not use TM as a backup, this time I'd suggest an app such as SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a clone of the internal HD. Leave both EHDs connected and TM will backup new or changed files automatically on a hourly basis. The clone you will need to set to backup on the schedule you want. For example I have my SuperDuper EHD set to backup only changed or updated files at 2AM every day.
The advantage of a clone is that if the computers internal HD crashes you can boot from a clone and continue working, TM will not do that but it's great for keeping an archive of all files. So if you want a version of a file from many months ago, TM will help you locate and restore it.

Trying to create HD disk image on external drive

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