When you quickly want to create an ISO image from a CD or DVD disk, simply do the following:
- insert the disk in your optical drive (yeah, I know this is obvious!)
- open the Disk Utility (Schijfhulpprogramma in Dutch)
- Go to Folder in the menu (Archief in Dutch)
- Then select New > Image from “<diskname>” (Nieuwe > Schijfkopie van “<schijfnaam>” in Dutch)
- Choose the options “Dvd/cd-master” with encoding “None” (Schijfkopiestructuur and Codering in Dutch). Save it to your Desktop (default location), and give a name, for instance DiskImage
- The Disk Utility will create a DiskImage.cdr at your desktop. Grab a coffee, there’s plenty of time.
- Now we will convert it to an image, with some help from the command prompt.
- Open a terminal window. Type Command+Space, then type Terminal, and press enter.
- In the terminal window, type the following commands:
cd ~/Desktop
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -ov DiskImage.iso DiskImage.cdr
This will take a few minutes, again. When it is finished, you may close the terminal.
If you foresee that you will need this disk in a Windows environment, you might want to consider making a joliet hybrid.
To do this, change the command above to the following:
cd ~/Desktop
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -ov DiskImage.iso DiskImage.cdr
You’re done! Now you have created an iso image of your disk. You can write it to a recordable at a later time, or open it directly bij doubleclicking the file. This works in both OS X and Ubuntu Linux. Windows has no built-in solution for opening .ISO files.
To actually create an ISO file from your own physical disc, you ll need to get a third-party program that can do so. There are many, many tools for this and many of them are packed with junkware . Beware!