Easily Mount an ISO in Mac OS X

Comment from James Nevara
Time: June 11, 2008, 5:22 pm

easy enough, is it really any harder than that in the desktop gui view?

Comment from uxp
Time: August 6, 2008, 2:44 pm

@ James: This is a whole lot easier than trying to use the GUI when you’re logged in remotely via SSH.

Comment from @ngel
Time: January 23, 2009, 4:39 pm

I tried it with an .img file and it doesn’t really work…

Comment from paulc
Time: February 26, 2009, 6:19 am

It worked.. but now what? the image is mounted but when i click on it it just does the same thing… which is nothing lol.. please help

Comment from Beforez
Time: March 11, 2009, 6:43 am

Dude, read the title.
“Easily mount an” – and then comes the important part – “ISO” – got it? .. “in Mac OS X”.

Okay, *sigh* I will explain…
I.S.O
ISO.
ISO is _not_ an IMG.
got it?

———————
Comment from @ngel
Time: January 23, 2009, 4:39 pm

I tried it with an .img file and it doesn’t really work…

Comment from cory
Time: March 16, 2009, 6:46 am

@Beforez

Maybe you should read the whole post before making impolite and condescending comments.

Comment from Shane
Time: March 27, 2009, 12:42 pm

I can’t get my .iso to mount… Can I get some assitance? The iso’s on the desktop, but it’s not mounting correctly for some reason.

Comment from sprale
Time: April 1, 2009, 1:16 pm

Mounting an ISO of Ubuntu 8.10 fails on my 10.5.6 Mac.

Comment from sprale
Time: April 1, 2009, 1:18 pm

Toast 10 mounted the ISO fine for me, though.

Comment from Kesr
Time: April 12, 2009, 7:34 pm

If your iso is on the desktop, simply type ”Cd desktop” in terminal before typing ”hdiutil mount sample.iso”

Comment from tc
Time: April 13, 2009, 6:34 pm

Hi. I’m trying to mount a wii iso file and even though I follow the above instructions, it simply doesn’t work. It says the iso file cannot be mounted (or something to that effect). Any ideas? I can’t burn it if I cannot mount it properly.

Comment from bogglegz
Time: April 22, 2009, 10:05 pm

@ Kesr: good point, but as unix commands are case sensitive, make sure to type “cd Desktop”

Comment from bogglegz
Time: April 22, 2009, 10:05 pm

or better yet, cd ~/Desktop

Comment from zer0crew
Time: June 2, 2009, 7:59 am

I used Toast 9
Select “Convert” tab, then “Image File”, then “Mount”
Worked great.

Comment from bob
Time: June 9, 2009, 2:27 pm

what does it mean by ‘…the path to the image you want to mount’? I dont know what to type. please help.

Comment from matt
Time: June 11, 2009, 11:58 pm

I just tried this as well, but got the error:

hdiutil: attach: extra image argument “Fantasy” – “Final” already specified
Usage: hdiutil attach [options]
hdiutil attach -help

any suggestions??

Comment from triyanto
Time: July 4, 2009, 1:08 am

who can help me to know location this ISO expect torent host

Comment from lucky
Time: July 4, 2009, 4:03 pm

I got the same thing, Matt. Any suggestions, anyone?

Comment from Drago
Time: July 9, 2009, 3:15 pm

can one boot mac software .iso image dvd on a mac or does it have to be .toast image extension?

Comment from chris
Time: July 28, 2009, 2:54 am

matt, and lucky i think the problem is that your not actually mounting an iso. your most likely trying to mount an .rar, etc. so make sure you DL a program like UnRarX and extract the .rar file then mount the .iso file that pops up.

Comment from klm
Time: August 2, 2009, 5:37 pm

@matt and lucky, mabye there are spaces in the name of your .iso? if so, you have to do something extra to make the shell delivering the name to the program as a single, unitary item – you need to quote or escape the name.

for example, use quotes around the name:

hdiutil mount “Final Fantasy XVLII – Yet More.iso”

alternately, you can also use backslashes to “escape” the spaces:

hdiutil mount Final\ Fantasy\ XCVI\ -\ The Epoch.iso

avoiding this delicacy in expressing special characters is one way a gui can make things easier – but sometimes, at the loss of flexibility.

Comment from klm
Time: August 2, 2009, 5:38 pm

(shucks – missed a backslash there…)

Comment from tmsyed
Time: August 5, 2009, 3:47 am

Great tip … I waisted hours in trying to import home videos from mini DVDs to iMovie. Tried several dvd rippers on a PC (because of MACs slotin dvd drive), several formats …. but wasn’t satisfied.
Mounting iso image of dvds is recognized as a camera by iMovie and import went flawlessly.
Thanks again.

Pingback from Mount CD/ DVD Image Sebagai Drive di Mac « Otak Kiri
Time: August 31, 2009, 6:39 pm

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Comment from Newb
Time: September 26, 2009, 9:46 am

Ok, so I hate to be a newb and post a newb question, I am a very new mac user (in fact got it yesterday), and thus far love it, however I used to mount dvd iso’s on my windows laptop and watch them using powerdvd (to save on the battery). What I am trying to figure out is the exact command string that needs to be entered in Terminal for an iso that is located on the desktop. I tried just opening terminal and entering the details as per the example at the top of the page but it could not find the file (i’m assuming that the example assumes that the iso is in a root directory). In windows it was pretty simple c:/folder/file.iso if anyone can point me in the right direction that would be great. Cheers

Comment from Michael
Time: September 26, 2009, 10:05 am

@Newb , you can usually just mount an iso by double clicking on it which will mount it through Disk Utility. If you want to use the command line though just type

hdiutil mount ~/Desktop/imagefile.iso

~ is your home directory, and /Desktop/ is the literal desktop. Alternatively, you can just type hdiutil mount and then drag the file itself into the terminal and the path to it will appear after ‘hdiutil mount’ which works well if your file is in some obscure location

Comment from Newb
Time: September 26, 2009, 1:22 pm

Fantastic, worked like a charm, appreciate it.

Comment from Confused
Time: October 16, 2009, 8:05 am

I successfully mounted the disk, but i still cannot open the application because it says there is no disk inserted. It is clearly mounted, though. Any suggestions?

Comment from Kerry
Time: October 21, 2009, 7:46 am

Confused, it may just make you more confused, but if you open Teminal and enter man hdiutil you will get the manual page for hdiutil. It’s possible some of the optional tags for the command, like -verbose or -debug might give you a clue.

Comment from spamaoararoaa!
Time: November 23, 2009, 2:37 am

type the following command: hdiutil mount sample.iso with sample.iso being the path to the image you want to mount. After the checksum is completet, your ISO will appear mounted on your Mac OS X desktop – that’s it. You you can actually mount virtually any other disk image type with hdiutil as well, so give .dmg .img a try too.

Comment from rippsss
Time: November 27, 2009, 12:58 pm

i am trying to mount a series of .iso images that work fine on my XP machine. when i try to mount them through the terminal i get the following error:
hdiutil: mount failed – not recognized
i receive similar errrors when attempting to mount the image by double-clicking the icon from the desktop and attempting to open the image in disk utility.

any thoughts on what is going on here? the software on the disc is supposed to be Windows/Mac compatible and, as i mentioned, i have been running the program from images mounted on my XP machine for quite some time now.

Pingback from links for 2009-12-09 « doug – off the record
Time: December 9, 2009, 10:07 pm

[...] Easily Mount an ISO in Mac OS X (tags: MacOS ISO drive) [...]

Comment from Atle
Time: December 19, 2009, 11:58 am

Thanks a lot!! I had a .iso I needed to restore with disk utility, but it wouldn’t recognize the .iso format. This little terminal trick worked like a charm! Awesome!!

Pingback from Problem mounting an ISO – Mac-Forums.com
Time: February 26, 2010, 8:17 am

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