How to: Advanced Disk Utility

There are many software tools that make your life easier when it comes to every day tasks like burning CD / DVD. In this “how to” article, I’ll show you how to create and burn disk image using disk utility.

Creating a disk image

Burning onto a CD or a DVD is popular on a modern PC. The most popular burning software on the Mac is Roxio Toast. It’s a shareware software and it does not come included with the OS X.

To burn optical media in the OS X, you can drag and drop files and folders onto a blank media then hit burn when you are done to start the burning process. The most convenient way is to use the disk utility instead. Disk Utility can be found at /Applications/Utilities folder. Disk Utility enables you to create DMG and ISO images that you can burn onto an optical media.

To burn a DMG image in disk utility, simply create a folder with everything you want to burn, click on the “New Image” and select the files to burn. When you save the disk image, open it in the disk utility click on it and hit the burn button on top to start burning files. To create and burn an ISO image follow steps below:

- Open disk utility.
- Drag disk image into the left pane.
- Click on the “Images menu and choose “Convert”.
- Select “DVD / CD master” from the “Image format” pop-up menu.
Name your file with .cdr extension and click save.
When disk utility finishes converting the file to an ISO image, in Finder change the file extension from .cdr to .iso.

Now you can burn an ISO image on both Mac and a Windows PC.

Another way of creating an ISO image is by using Terminal:

cd ~/Desktop
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o Testfile.iso Testfile.cdr

You can also burn ISO images on your Windows PC using burning software like Nero or similar.