Mount a .dmg bigger than your Hard Drive?

[DanimalAK]

Hello,

I recently sold my macbook pro. In the meantime, I have reverted to using a 7 year old ibook (running 10.4.11) for ichat, email, etc...

I have a .dmg that is a backup of the macbook pro, and I wanted to mount it and pull some files off it. Despite the fact that it would take days to mount on the ibook, I was wondering if it is possible to mount a 100GB dmg on a hardrive that is only 80GB?

Does anyone know if this is possible? Thanks.

 

[Cboss]

It's on an external hard drive? Just connect it and open the dmg from the external.

 

[DanimalAK]

Yes, a 100 GB .dmg is on a 500 GB external hardrive with plenty of freespace. My concern was that mounted .dmgs show up on the desktop, and my desktop is part of an 80 GB drive that is smaller than the .dmg itself.

I'm not trying to move the .dmg file onto the 80gb harddrive, I understand that is impossible.

Would I need to give the .dmg special instructions to mount on the external drive? Or is OS X just going to figure it out and make this work when I double click the .dmg.

 

[pdjudd]

Would I need to give the .dmg special instructions to mount on the external drive? Or is OS X just going to figure it out and make this work when I double click the .dmg.

No, mounting just mounts it. Doesn't matter what the size of your internal drive. It is no different as you plugging in your larger drive - Mounting is not a copy function so it will work like any other drive of any capacity.

 

[DanimalAK]

Thanks for confirming that it will work. The reason I was concerned was that I couldn't easily try it to see if it would work. The G3 ibook is so old, it's been verifying the .dmg for 16 hours now (which I think is to be expected with that hardware) and is still below halfway done. Gladly, it appears to be making constant progress.

Any bets on when the dmg will cross the finish line?

 

[BlueRevolution]

You can safely skip verification.