Making dmg of boot drive?

[jbodger]

I tried to drag my usual boot drive (I had booted off another internal drive with system 10.5) to DropDMG in order to make a bootable dmg, and it gave me the following error:

Error File '/Users/jackbodgerLP/Desktop/G5TowerHD_temp.dmg' doesn't exist. for “G5TowerHD”

How do I get a bootable image of my usual boot drive?

Thanks,

Jbodger

[Michael Tsai]

I tried to drag my usual boot drive (I had booted off another internal drive with system 10.5) to DropDMG in order to make a bootable dmg, and it gave me the following error:

Error File '/Users/jackbodgerLP/Desktop/G5TowerHD_temp.dmg' doesn't exist. for “G5TowerHD”

How do I get a bootable image of my usual boot drive?

I’m not sure why it would report that error, unless there were an underlying OS error that was not reported back to DropDMG, causing it to expect to see a file that wasn’t there. Does the error recur if you try it again, or if you try a different image destination?

In any case, DropDMG is not currently intended for making bootable images of read-write volumes such as hard drives. It will copy all the files, but the result is not guaranteed to be bootable. Making bootable images of read-only volumes such as DVDs will work, however.

[rekha]

CCC is a possibility, but I seem to recall reading that it is possible to do it with Disk Utility. I'll keep an open mind about CCC as an option.

[Michael Tsai]

CCC is a possibility, but I seem to recall reading that it is possible to do it with Disk Utility.

Disk Utility can do it, but only if you unmount the source volume. The advantage to something like CCC or SuperDuper is that you can copy from the current boot volume.

[Michael Tsai]

DropDMG 3.0 adds support for creating device images of read-write volumes.