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Interface Main window The main window for FreeDMG has been designed to be as basic as possible. A toolbar provides easy access to commonly used disk image operations with the click of the mouse. The large drop zone in the center of the window provides a large target for users to drag-and-drop their files, folders, and volumes. The large progress bar and status field make it simple to determine where the application is in the imaging process Preferences Toolbar Utility panel Log view Options view Creating disk images Drag and Drop To use the software in it's most basic form (creating a disk image on the fly): Step 1: Drag files and/or folders to the FreeDMG window, or to the FreeDMG icon in the dock. Step 2: When the window or icon shades, drop your files and/or folders The disk image will be created in the same folder as the source file/folder if the "Image on fly" option is chosen in preferences. Open Users can create disk images by selecting "Open" from underneath the "File" menu. When selecting a file or folder, the program will automatically create a disk image of the specified type (from Preferences), prompting the user for a location if necessary. A preference can be made to set the action to be taken on the opening of an ISO or Disk Image. This includes mounting (the default), burning, converting, verifying, and other options. Open on launch Users can open FreeDMG by dropping a file or folder on top of the FreeDMG icon (either in the Finder, or from the Dock). The software also has the ability to quit after opening on launch - this makes it convenient to use FreeDMG as a disk image "droplet" - opening up to image the provided items, and quitting to keep system memory use low. New blank images FreeDMG can create new UDIF (read/write) or SPARSE (expandable read/write) images of a specified size. Users can invoke this command under File -> New. Mac OS 10.5 introduces the ability to save disk images as "sparsebundles", which are the recommended sparsetype for that platform. Sparsebundles are not available in Mac OS X v.10.3 or 10.4. Users can specify an image's volume name when creating images from scratch. The default volume name can be specified in Preferences for custom naming when other imaging methods are used. Creating new images allows a custom volume format to be used. This may not be recommended, depending on your use. To create cross-platform images, the "Make Hybrid" option should be chosen from underneath the "Images" menu. See the Make Hybrid section below. Image from folder The best way to create custom disk images is to use the "Image from Folder" command from underneath the "Images" menu. Please note that this command be used to image folders as well as volumes. It may be recommended to use the "Image from Device" option when creating images from bootable disks, but "Image from Volume" (which uses Image from Folder) can be just as effective (and will preserve permissions). Scrub image When a disk image is created, certain Finder attributes, stored in the '.DS_Store' file are removed. This is called "scrubbing" of the image. This is done to eliminate the amount of personal information that is disclosed (in invisible files!!!) when creating electronic media that may be publicly distributed. This can also eliminate some attributes that user wish to preserve. The default is to scrub images - this feature can be disabled in FreeDMG preferences. Image from Volume This command creates a disk image from a volume or other mounted disk. The "Image from Folder" command is actually used for this function. Permissions should be preserved when using either method. Image from Device Image from device may be the most comprehensive disk image function - this should preserve the partition map of the device specified. All permissions should be preserved, as this image is done by block copy. Limit segments to size The "Limit segments to size" preference is only available with the "Image from Device" command. For some reason, this option is specified for both device/folder imaging, but only works on devices (in 10.4 - not tested in 10.5). Converting disk images Image formats UDRW - UDIF read/write image UDRO - UDIF read-only image UDCO - UDIF ADC-compressed image UDZO - UDIF zlib-compressed image UDBZ - UDIF bzip2-compressed image (OS X 10.4+ only) UFBI - UDIF entire image with MD5 checksum UDRo - UDIF read-only (obsolete format) UDCo - UDIF compressed (obsolete format) UDTO - DVD/CD-R master for export UDxx - UDIF stub image UDSP - SPARSE (grows with content) UDSB - SPARSEBUNDLE (grows with content; bundle-backed) RdWr - NDIF read/write image (deprecated) Rdxx - NDIF read-only image (Disk Copy 6.3.3 format) ROCo - NDIF compressed image (deprecated) Rken - NDIF compressed (obsolete format) DC42 - Disk Copy 4.2 image In addition to the compression offered by some formats, the UDIF and NDIF read-only formats completely remove unused space in HFS and UFS filesystems. For UDZO, the zlib compression level can be spec- ified. The default compression level is 1 (fastest). Image modification Resize Resize a disk image or the containers within it. Given a read/write partitioned UDIF, if the last partition is Apple_HFS, attempt to resize the partition to the end of the image, or to the last used block in the embedded HFS/HFS+ filesystem (depending on size_spec). On older systems, resize was limited to pre-defined limits that depended on how the filesystem was created. As of OS X 10.4, resize can be used to grow an HFS filesystem within an image to any size sup- ported by HFS and the filesystem hosting the image. resize is often used when a device image needs to be shrunk so that the HFS/HFS+ partition can be converted to CD-R/DVD-R format and still be burned. Note that gaps cannot be reclaimed as resize does not move data. -fsargs can sometimes be used to minimize filesystem-generated gaps. resize can grow a filesystem and image within the bounds of the image and filesystem formats (e.g. roughly 2^63 bytes for HFS+ inside of a UDRW on HFS+). Compress Scans the bands of a sparse (SPARSE or SPARSEBUNDLE) disk image containing an HFS filesystem, removing those parts of the image which are no longer being used by the filesystem. Depending on the location of files in the hosted filesystem, compact may or may not shrink the image. For SPARSEBUNDLE images, completely unused band files are simply removed. Change password Change the passphrase for an encrypted image. The image must have encryption applied or the operation will result in error. To apply encryption, convert the image (even to the same type), and add encryption. Burn Burn image to optical media in an attached burning device. In all cases, a prompt for media will be printed once an appro- priate drive has been found. Segment Segment a NDIF or UDIF disk image. Segmented images work around limitations in file size which are sometimes imposed by filesystems, network protocols, or media. Note: whether or not the segments are encrypted is determined by the options passed to segment and not by the state of the source image. Make Hybrid Generate a potentially-hybrid filesystem in a read-only disk image using the DiscRecording framework's content creation system. source can either be a directory or a disk image. The gener- ated image can later be burned using burn, or converted to another read-only format with convert. By default, the filesystem will be readable on most modern computing plat- forms. The generated filesystem is not intended for conver- sion to read/write, but can safely have its files copied to a read/write filesystem by ditto(8) or asr(8) (in file-copy mode). hdiutil supports generating El Torito-style bootable ISO9660 filesystems, which is commonly used for booting x86-based hardware. The specification includes several emulation modes. By default, an El Torito boot image emulates either a 1.2MB, 1.44MB, or 2.88MB floppy drive, depending on the size of the image. Also available are "No Emulation" and "Hard Disk Emulation" modes, which allow the boot image to either be loaded directly into memory, or be virtualized as a parti- tioned hard disk, respectively. The El Torito options should not be used for data CDs. Add SLA Add software license agreements to the resource fork of the selected image. Software license agreements (SLAs) allow creators of disk images to force and end user to agree or disagree to a license before gaining access to software or materials. This can guarantee that anyone opening the image will be held to the specified terms and conditions. Flatten Flatten a read-only (or compressed) UDIF disk image into a single-fork file. By default, metadata will be stored both as XML (for the kernel's use) and in an embedded resource fork (for OS X 10.1 and earlier). Note: UDBZ is not supported in- kernel. Unflatten Unflatten a UDIF disk image, creating a dual-fork file in tra- ditional format (resource-only; no XML). If the resource fork representation of the metadata becomes greater than 16 MB, the operation will fail with error -39 ("End of fork"). Get Info Print out information about a disk image. Verify Compute the checksum of a read-only (or compressed) image, and verify it against the value stored in the image. Checksum Calculate the specified checksum on the image data, regardless of image type. Type is one of: UDIF-CRC32 - CRC-32 image checksum UDIF-MD5 - MD5 image checksum DC42 - Disk Copy 4.2 CRC28 - CRC-32 (NDIF) CRC32 - CRC-32 MD5 - MD5 SHA - SHA SHA1 - SHA-1 SHA256 - SHA-256 SHA384 - SHA-384 SHA512 - SHA-512 Make Internet Enabled Enable or disable post-processing for the image. Without arguments, IDME will be enabled. If so enabled, upon first encounter with Disk Copy (on OS X 10.2.3+) or a browser using the feature for a download on OS X 10.3, the image will have its visible contents copied into the directory containing the image and the image will be put into the trash with IDME turned off. An internet enabled disk image allows web browsers such as Safari to automatically mount downloaded disk images, copy the image's contents to the location that it was downloaded to, moving the image to the trash afterwards. Scan for block restore See "Scan for restore" Scan for restore This option prepares an image for block restore using "asr" or other tools in 10.4. In 10.3, the "Scan Image for Block Restore" must be chosen for block copy restore, and "Scan Image for Restore" to prepare the image for file copy restore. Software License Agreements Creating SLAs To create or edit software license agreements, use the SLA window/panel. This can be opened from underneath "Window" -> "Software License Agreements". In SLA pane, you can add Software License agreements to the table view at the top of the screen by clicking the "+" button. Give the SLA a human-readable name, and select the license's locality. The SLA's ID will be set depending upon the localization or language chosen. The order that localized licenses are displayed get derived from a user's "International" system preference settings*. Modifying SLAs To modify a Software License Agreement, select the license that you'd like to modify from the table at the top of the SLA pane. The current license should display in the text field below. Make your modifications, tab out of the license text field, or select another license to save the changes. Changes are also saved when the "OK" button or "Add to Image" button are selected. Removing SLAs SLAs can be removed from the FreeDMG SLA window by selecting the license, and clicking the "-" button inside the SLA panel. To remove and SLA from a disk image, the image must be converted to a read-write format, and then back into a compressed/read-only format. SLA languages The current list of languages available for Software License Agreements in FreeDMG are as follows: German English Spanish French Italian Japanese Dutch Swedish Brazilian Portugese Simplified Chinese Traditional Chinese Danish Finnish French Canadian Korean Norwegian *If an SLA is not available for a particular language, please contact me, and I will attempt to get your language added.