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jedikeeper

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 3, 2015
6
0
Mexico
Hi,

I have created more than 1 bootable installer for MacOS High Sierra 10.3.6 (17G25)
I want to compare my bootable installers for equal content from my USB Sticks

Is there any app that can help me with this task?

Thanks
 
How large are the installers? I'm sure there's an easier way than this, but if its a modest 8GB stick, you could use terminal and dd the entire disk to a dmg then generate a hash checksum of that dmg. dd would make a bit copy of the drive, so you would be comparing the drives bit for bit.
 
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How large are the installers? I'm sure there's an easier way than this, but if its a modest 8GB stick, you could use terminal and dd the entire disk to a dmg then generate a hash checksum of that dmg. dd would make a bit copy of the drive, so you would be comparing the drives bit for bit.

The installer are about 5.24 GB, in a modest 8GB Stick
Can you elaborate? I know how to use terminal, is dd a command?
That's what I want to hash the .dmg and comparing the drives bit for bit

But I still don't know how to

Please help

Tc
jedi
 
So I've never actually done this, I kind of just thought of this after reading your question, but I think it would go something like this.

1. Use "diskutil list" to get the disk identifier for the flash drive when its plugged in, it'll be something like /dev/disk2 for the whole disk, or /dev/disk2s2 for the partition. In theory you only need to use the partition not the whole disk.

2. Make a dmg on your machine locally by doing "sudo dd if=/dev/disk2s2 of=~/Desktop/InstallerA.dmg" for the first drive, then maybe the same command but use "InstallerB.dmg" for the next one and so on. Replace disk2s2 with whatever you are finding is the identifier in your case.

3. Since MD5 checksum should be adequate for your purpose, use "openssl md5 ~/Desktop/InstallerA.dmg" to get its MD5 hash. If you want you can also do sha256 or something. Then just compare the hashes.

Also, might I ask, what are you ultimately trying to achieve? Do you have reason to believe that multiple installers made from the same installer app aren't equal? Let me know how this works, and as always, be careful using sudo and dd together.
 
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I can see a problem with the dd approach. Looking at a High Sierra installer (10.13.5) on a USB flash drive I have (created mid May), I see the .fseventsd directory from a couple of days ago - I put the flash drive in to check on something or other. I also see some Spotlight files from a month after I created the flash drive. I'm also not sure if the OS file tables would be guaranteed to be the same if there's some difference in the flash drives. Considering that you originally posted this on Thursday, maybe you want to just make a new post and just ask for suggestions for a file comparison app - one that can handle many files and that will allow you to filter out files which typically get created after the files are copied (Spotlight files, metadata files, etc.).
 
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treekram has a good point here, if just one bit is off my whole method doesn't work. I guess if you want to guarantee that multiple installers are the same, just make one then use the dd approach to copy it to other drives?
 
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