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Question: IS a DMG independant of partition type (IE: GUID/APM)

glossywhite

glossywhite

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Hi all. I just managed to successfully mess of the backup of my old Macbook drive. Here is what I did:


Old MB HDD (80Gb) >> DMG >> New MB HDD (320Gb)

What I FORGOT TO DO, was partition the new drive using "GUID", and restored the DMG back to the new drive, when it was partitioned in APM... like DUH!!.

What I am curious to discover is... are Disk images independant of the partition type from which they were created?.

What I mean is, do you have a "GUID" dmg file or an "APM" dmg file, or are they JUST HFS/HFS+ etc?. I am so confused... (I have now partitioned the new drive with GUID (Macbook) and am restoring the DMG back to it. Thanks!!.
 
I don't understand you fully. You formatted your hard drive with the dmg file on it?

If I understand you correctly, any disk image will be able to be opened on any Mac.
 
Interesting question, and I'd never really thought about that.

I'm going to hazard a guess that "it depends"--if you image an entire device (which is one option, and I assume what you did) that includes the partition map. I'm saying this because if you image an optical disk and burn that, you get EXACTLY what you started with--I've duplicated bootable Windows installers this way.

If you image just a partition (or create a blank DMG and add stuff to it), you get just an HFS+ or whatever partition--the partition format would, I assume, be "DMG" or something to that effect.

Of course, I don't know the actual answer, so that might be wrong. Here's hoping somebody more familiar with the inner workings of disk images posts a more definite answer.
 
Kilamite said:
I don't understand you fully. You formatted your hard drive with the dmg file on it?

If I understand you correctly, any disk image will be able to be opened on any Mac.
Click to expand...
Posted while I was typing, but he essentially cloned his old drive to new, via a DMG. Problem was that he cloned EVERYTHING, which included the old (and wrong) partition map. He's now just (I assume) transferring the individual partition from the image to the new drive (same as a clone from one formatted drive to another with CCC or the like), so the partition map will be in the correct format.
 
Makosuke said:
Posted while I was typing, but he essentially cloned his old drive to new, via a DMG. Problem was that he cloned EVERYTHING, which included the old (and wrong) partition map. He's now just (I assume) transferring the individual partition from the image to the new drive (same as a clone from one formatted drive to another with CCC or the like), so the partition map will be in the correct format.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I am following you; what I have NOW done, is to partition my target drive in two, using GUID map. I then restore my DMG of my old drive (NOT a dmg of a partition, it's of the WHOLE DRIVE AS ONE VOLUME) to the new drive, partition ONE of TWO (which are both GUID map format).
 
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