Hi, Cindy. Welcome to the Discussions.
1. You wrote:
"then comes the error message."
What is the
exact text of the error message?
2. A reading of the
man (manual) page for the
hditutil command, under the discussion of the
convert verb, indicates that all NDIF image formats except the Disk Copy 6.3.3 format have been deprecated, i.e. are considered obsolete and support for them will be withdrawn entirely at some future time. That support may have already been withdrawn from Disk Utility.
3. There are no third-party utilities that can convert or mount NDIF images. This is because they used a proprietary, Apple-only compression scheme. See the section entitled "New Disk Image Format" in
this document.
4. How comfortable are you using Terminal? I ask because it may be possible to convert the NDIF images to a supported, current format that can be mounted using the
convert verb of
hditutil. The general syntax of the command would be:
hdiutil convert /pathtoNDIF -format UDRO -o ~/Desktop/newname
where:
•
hdiutil is the command
•
convert is the verb: we want hdiutil to convert the image to another disk image format.
•
/pathtoNDIF is the directory path to one of the NDIF images you want to convert.
•
-format is an option of the
convert verb, specifying that the next string will be the new format.
•
UDRO is the new format: UDIF Read-Only disk image, i.e. a Read-Only disk image from which you can copy the files it contains.
•
-o is an option of the
convert verb, specifying that the next string will be the path for saving the converted disk image.
•
~/Desktop/newname specifies that the converted image should be saved to a disk image with file name
newname on your desktop. If
newname is to contain spaces, the easiest way to handle this is to include all of
~/Desktop/newname in double-quotes.
The entire command is typed as a single line: stretch your browser window to see this if the text is wrapped when reading this post.
For example, if you had one of the NDIF files on your desktop and its file name was
OldDocs.img, you could convert this to a currrent Read-Only disk image format with the single command:
hdiutil convert ~/Desktop/OldDocs.img -format UDRO -o ~/Desktop/New_OldDocs
which will create
New_OldDocs.dmg on your desktop. Double-clicking
New_OldDocs.dmg should result in it being mounted so you can then copy the files from such if desired.
Good luck!
😉 Dr. Smoke
Author:
Troubleshooting Mac® OS X