Disk Utility issue since snow Leopard Ugrade

Question

Disk Utility issue since snow Leopard Ugrade

Since I have upgraded to Snow Leopard I have been unable
to use Disk Utility to Restore DMG Images. Any ideas?

Specific Steps:

Plug In Firewire Drive.
Boot from Install CD
Create Image of my "Macintosh HD" Snow Leopard, save to Firewire Drive partition.
Boot from Snow Leopard on internal HD
Try to Restore "Macnintosh HD" dmg onto another partition on firewire drive.

Note: It does not matter if I use installed Snow Leopard Disk Utility or Disk Utility
on booted install DVD, results are same, as follows:

Restore Failure:

Could not find any scan information. The source image needs to be imagescanned before it can be restored.

so... from Disk Utility Menu

Images>>Scan For Restore produces this erroe:

Unable to Scan "Macintosh HD.dmg" (Invalid argument)

Nothing has chaged in my process here since 10.5.8 any I
have since re-installed 10.5.8 in a separate partition on
my internal HDD and above procedure works. It does NOT
work in Snow Leopard. This is unacceptable and a downloaded
patch ain't gonna cut it for me, I need the Disk Utility on the
Boot DVD to work. Apple is gonna have to have a recall.

Help. Can anyone else reproduce this error?

White Macbook, Circa Aug 2008, 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo

mac book white, 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Sep 7, 2009 11:39 AM

Reply

Answer 1

baltwo

Level 9

62,362 points

Sep 7, 2009 12:20 PM in response to Community User

Can't help with the DU issue, but strongly recommend that you use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! (both have SL compatible apps) to just put a bootable clone directly onto the partition, bypassing the need to create a disk image that you can't scan for restore. Alternatively, try creating it from the Terminal using the diskutil and asr command line tools.

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Answer 2

Sep 7, 2009 2:55 PM in response to Community User

The solution in mount the image

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Answer 3

WPHays

Level 1

4 points

Sep 16, 2009 1:16 PM in response to Community User

Hey Kenneth,

I think I can help out with the Restore Image problem. What I have had to do is mount the image first, and then restore from the mounted image.

Give that a shot, and let me know if it helps.

Thanks!,
-Patrick

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Answer 4

Seth9496

Level 1

0 points

Sep 16, 2009 6:45 PM in response to WPHays

Hello,
I am having the exact same problem, I tried previous suggestions, mounting the image etc. to no avail. Any more advice would be greatly appreciated. This is a terrible flaw in my opinion.

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Answer 5

RazRut

Level 1

14 points

Sep 19, 2009 8:27 PM in response to Seth9496

Hola, here is the ANSWER;

connect USB format to Apple HFS
then Mount your DMG file
go to HDU
then select your Mounted DMG image on left hand side right click and say "Set as SOURCE"

select your destination (formatted USB drive)
your password

once finish reboot with ALT key & follow instructions

And ENJOY with SNOW LEOPARD

Cheers

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Answer 6

Ktng

Level 1

0 points

Sep 25, 2009 12:09 AM in response to RazRut

yes! it did work by doing your steps!
many thx! 🙂

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Answer 7

Hitokage

Level 1

0 points

Oct 19, 2009 8:14 AM in response to Community User

The 'official' method to resolve "The source image needs to be imagescanned before it can be restored." is to follow these steps.
Select the image.
Go to the top of the Disk Utility application > Images > Scan for Restore.

There you go.... let it do its thing... then restore then image the same way you are use to!

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Answer 8

Dec 14, 2009 3:22 AM in response to Community User

Use the command line tool asr, type

sudo asr imagescan --source +<disk image path>+ --filechecksum

You will need to enter your adminstrator password due to the sudo.

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Answer 9

gmnisson

Level 1

0 points

Feb 5, 2010 9:06 AM in response to Hitokage

in reply to "HitoKage". This does NOT work. Atleast in SnowLeopard in a MacBook

Message was edited by: gmnisson

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Answer 10

plassfam

Level 1

5 points

Feb 13, 2010 9:23 PM in response to gmnisson

Agreed...However, the steps given by RazRut works on my 10.6 Server. Thanks for the help on this.

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Answer 11

Feb 18, 2010 9:09 AM in response to plassfam

If you have an image you are sure is good but still getting the "invalid argument" error do this:
1: open terminal window
2: type in sudo asr -noverify -source <source image path here> -target <target path here>

that worked for me.

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Answer 12

Feb 26, 2010 4:32 PM in response to Jeremiahchub

When 'none of the above' worked for me......

In ADU I selected the mounted disc (white disc icon) as the source instead of the actual .dmg file...

(dragged the white disc icon into the source box)

This worked straight away, whereas dragging the .dmg file inside it threw an immediate error.......

I believe this is because there are a large number of (required) invisible files evident within the mounted disc image (try Cocktail to show them), that aren't 'viewable' by the utility if you select the .dmg file itself.

: /

Spiro'

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Answer 13

Mr.Who

Level 1

0 points

Mar 12, 2010 5:12 PM in response to Pablo Alvarez Gonzalez

Thank you so much, worked like a charm 🙂

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Answer 14

Mar 17, 2010 4:33 PM in response to Community User

'spirochete' was right; at least it worked for me. Apparently there are some invisible files put on the external drive (besides the .dmg file) when a backup is made from Disk Utility. (It would be nice if Apple put this important fact in their support document for restoring from backup.) I had the exact same problem as the original poster. I was prompted to scan the .dmg file in order to restore it, so I went to Images/Scan for Restore, only to get the error message 'Unable to scan (invalid argument).

But when I dragged the external hard drive's icon into the 'Source' field and clicked 'Restore', it worked! (In my case, my external hard drive was a Western Digital 'My Book'. In the left column of Disk Utility, it showed up as '1 TB WD' for the root, and then had an icon labeled 'My Book' under it. It was the 'My Book' icon that I dragged into the Source field. The '1 TB WD' would not drag over.)

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Answer 15

Mar 17, 2010 5:44 PM in response to Merged Content 1

Scratch that (sorry). After and hour and a half of everything supposedly copying over, nothing was copied over. I went to 'Startup Disk' thinking that I could finally start up from the internal hard drive, but the only available choice to start up from was the Install disc.

Back to square one. I'll post the solution once I find it.

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