Read both partitions on a hybrid disk

Aug 28, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: johnga1t

It seems that there have been lots of posts here (and elsewhere) about trying to read both the Mac-friendly HFS and Windows-friendly ISO 9660 partitions on a hybrid disk under Mac OS X. (Automount mounts only the HFS partition for you.)

I wish I could take credit for the solution, which astrozomby posted at osxfaq, but instead I'll just share the wealth. Here are the instructions, rewritten with some more details...

Determine your CD-ROMs device ID:

  1. In Terminal without the hybrid disk inserted, do a diskutil list to see what disks are present. They'll appear as /dev/disk?, with ? being a number. I'll assume /dev/disk0 is the only thing on the list at this point.
  2. Insert the hybrid disk.
  3. Do a diskutil list again, and take note of the new disk ID that appears -- this device is your CD-ROM. I'll assume /dev/disk1 now appears along with /dev/disk0.
Mount the ISO 9660 image:
  1. Assuming you'd like to mount the image under /Volumes, do something like mkdir /Volumes/isoimg in Terminal to create a directory. (Of course you could mount the image under any directory you like, including your Desktop.)
  2. Do sudo mount -t cd9660 -o nodev,nosuid,read_only /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/isoimg to mount the image. Since you've sudoed the command, you'll be asked for the password to your account. I'm assuming you have admin rights on your machine.
  3. You're all set. Hack around in Terminal or issue an open . command to get a Finder window.
A few notes: Hope this is useful for people.

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