DMG is a disk image format used on Mac OS X and it is difficult to open on Windows computer. So, the guide below will let you people give a way to open DMG files on Windows through a free utility name HFSExplorer. Continue reading after the break to read the complete process to do that. How to Extract DMG File Data on Windows. You need to EJECT the mounted disk first that mounts when you double-click the.dmg file. Drag the mounted disk to the trash to eject it. You should then be able to trash the.dmg file. You say the application doesn't work when you manage to trash the.dmg file. About DMG Files. Our goal is to help you understand what a file with a.dmg suffix is and how to open it. The Apple Disk Image file type, file format description, and Mac, Windows, and Linux programs listed on this page have been individually researched and verified by the FileInfo team.
So you’re running Linux on your computer, maybe Ubuntu, and you have some files with the .dmg extension. In this guide, we’re going to talk about how to open, mount, extract, and otherwise get your files from these pesky DMG images. You could always just extract the files on a Mac, then transfer them back to your Linux machine. But if you really want to do this on Linux, without having to rely on Mac, here’s how to do it.
![File File](/uploads/1/2/7/7/127748736/750241622.jpg)
Dmg File On Windows
What are DMG image files?
Simply put, it’s a kind of image file. But not an image like a jpeg is an image. DMG is Apple’s proprietary disk image format, native to Mac OS X. There are actually a whole bunch of different types, format and options within this format. There are options for encryption, compression, and different kinds of partition schemes, among others. Unfortunately, this can make things pretty confusing when we’re trying to gain access to the data contained in one of these images.
DMG images are typically a kind of Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF), although there are others, namely NDIF and SPARSE. Although the .dmg file extension is usually used, they can also sometimes have an .img extension, or in some cases no extension at all. Their MIME type is application/x-apple-diskimage.
The HFS/HFS+ (Mac OS Extended/Journaled) file system is typically used in DMGs. However, this isn’t always the case. You may also sometimes find FAT and ExFAT files systems, as well as variations on HFS.
Does my system support DMG?
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome when trying to work with DMG files is working with the HFS file system (Mac OS Extended). Linux supports HFS through the “hfs” and “hfsplus” kernel modules.
There’s an easy way to test if your system has these kernel modules. Plug in a USB drive formatted with the Mac OS Extended file system. If your particular distribution doesn’t have the appropriate modules, you will likely get an error message. On Ubuntu, you’ll get a popup window declaring “Ubuntu: Unable to mount '.
Alternatively, we can see if the kernel module files are present with find:
We want to see two files: “hfs.ko” and “hfsplus.ko”. If find doesn’t return these files, your system probably doesn’t support HFS.
You could also try “modinfo”:
modinfo hfs
and modinfo hfsplus
should return something like:If you get '
modinfo: ERROR: Module hfsplus not found
' your system doesn’t have these modules.Not all Linux kernels and distributions support HFS. This is especially the case for certain distributions that are a few years old. If you have kernel support for HFS, great! If not, don’t worry. There are still ways to extract data from your DMG files. While it’s nice to have the option to mount the images we’re working with, this is really the only functionality we’re losing without having the hfs and hfsplus modules. The two programs we’re going to use later on (P7ZIP and dmg2img) do not require kernel support to function.
What kinds of DMG images can be opened in Linux?
This guide is about how to open, mount, and extract files from read/write, read only, and compressed DMG image files. The following partition schemes have all been tested with the techniques discussed here.
- Apple Partition Map
- CD/DVD (partitioned)
- CD/DVD (partitioned) with ISO data
- Hard disk
- Master Boot Record Partition Map
- No partition map
This guide does not cover how to handle sparse disk images (.sparseimage), sparse bundle disk images (.sparsebundle), or CD/DVD masters. DMG images with partition scheme types of “CD/DVD” and “GUID Partition Map” do not appear to work with the techniques described here.
Option 1: Mount the DMG
If the Linux distribution you’re on has HFS support in the kernel (Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS supports it), it’s pretty easy to just mount the DMG image:
We’re using “sudo” because we need root privileges to mount things. The HFS+ file system type is specified with “-t hfsplus”. The “/mnt” at the end of the command specifies where we’re mounting the image.
Unmount the image with
sudo umount /mnt
If you get a wrong fs type message like the one below, it means the DMG file is either of an unsupported type, or it’s compressed. Unsupported images include sparse images, sparse disk bundles, CD/DVD masters, and images with partition schemes of the CD/DVD or GUID Partition Map types.
Use “file” to learn a little more about the image file:
If you get
image.dmg: x86boot sector
that means it’s probably using a GUID Partition Map and isn’t supported. This isn’t good, however, it’s also not too terribly common.What’s more common is to see something like this:
If mounting isn’t working, and this is what you’re seeing with “file image.dmg”, then you’re luck!. Our problems are being caused by compression. Linux doesn’t like to mount compressed DMG images. To get around this little obstacle, we’ll use dmg2img (see below).
Option 2: Use dmg2img for compressed images
So you have a DMG image that you can’t mount because it’s compressed. You’ve done “file compressed_image.dmg” and you got “compressed_image.dmg: bzip2 compressed data”. The fix? That’s easy: use dmg2img to convert it to an uncompressed image. Once you run the image through dmg2img you should be able to mount it no problem.
Don’t have dmg2img? It’s usually pretty easy to get using your distribution’s package management. On Ubuntu, you’d do:
Using dmg2img isn’t very difficult. Type “dmg2img” into the command line followed by the name of the DMG file you want to decompress. The Mac OS X version of Firefox is a good example of a compressed DMG file.
Now mount the resulting .img file:
Option 3: Extract DMG contents with P7ZIP
P7ZIP is awesome. It’s the Linux/BSD version of 7-Zip. Check out their SourceForge page here With it you can literally extract files from any kind of image or archive. Just kidding… It doesn’t really work with every format conceivable. However, it can handle (in alphabetical order): ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z. Impressed? I certainly am!
Installing p7zip is pretty easy using your distribution’s package management system. On Ubuntu with apt-get:
In addition to being able to extract data from compressed and uncompressed images alike, P7ZIP doesn’t require the HFS kernel modules at all. In the example below, we’re going to extract all of the files from “Firefox 33.1.1.dmg”. When we’re done, we’ll have a tidy little folder called “Firefox”.
Invoke P7ZIP to extract archives and images with “7z x”.
Notice that 7z extracted three files: “0.ddm”, “1.Apple_partition_map”, and “2.hfs”. To actually get to the files, we’ll need to run 7z again on “2.hfs”.
We picked “2.hfs” because it was the biggest of the three, meaning it was probably the one with the data. Simple but effective logic. After a few moments, you should have a folder called “Firefox” with all of the files from the original DMG.
Use Dmg File On Windows
DMG file format is one of the most well-known container format to distribute and compress software on Mac operating system. You can compare DMG files with ISO files in Windows computers. The only difference is DMG is compatible with Mac computers and ISO is compatible with Windows computers.
It is the most popular file format to install Mac or Windows operating system these days. However, if you try to run DMG files on Windows, it will not be compatible and no application in Windows can run it. Nevertheless, if you convert the DMG file to ISO file format then you can easily extract all the files from that ISO image on Windows computers.
Reasons to Convert DMG to ISO:
- DMG is not compatible with Windows operating system.
- Any Windows operating system can extract files from ISO image.
- Install operating systems or software on DMG files in Windows computers.
- ISO files gives more options to operate with in Windows systems.
In this tutorial, we will show you two efficient ways to convert DMG to ISO image files so that you can run them in Windows operating system.
Method: Convert DMG to ISO with Command Prompt
In this method, we will be combining dmd2img tool with command prompt app to convert DMG to ISO file format. It is a bit complicated but if you follow the below instructions correctly then you will surely be able to accomplish this.
Step 1. Launch your favorite browser and open http://vu1tur.eu.org/tools/
Step 2. Download the dmg2img tool by clicking on “win32 binary” link.
Step 3. After downloading the zipped file, right click on it and choose “Extract All…” from the given options.
Step 4. Now, press Shift and make a right click together on the folder where you have extracted the files to open the command prompt window.
Step 5. Click dmg2img.exe file and type the following command line on the command prompt window and press Enter.
dmg2img <source file.dmg> <destination file.iso>
For example, if want to convert a DMG file named as abcdef.dmg then type the following command line
dmg2img “C:UsersAdministratorDesktopabcde.dmg”
“C:UsersAdministratorDocumentsconvertabcde.iso”
Step 6. After you have hit enter, the file will be converter in no time.
Step 7. You may now burn the ISO image on your Windows operating system without any issue.
Conclusion –
Converting DMG to ISO could be challenging if you don’t know how to do it properly. However, in this guide we have shown two amazing ways to accomplish this without damaging the original DMG file. Remember, if you are using Mac then DMG file is enough to install apps and operating systems, but in Windows systems, you will have to convert the DMG to ISO in order to make it usable. It is suggested that you download and copy the DMG file on your Windows computer first then perform the above methods to convert it.