Posts Tagged ‘Disk Utility’

Making a copy of a CD with your Mac is simple and easy using Disk Utility which is built right in to Mac OS X.  First, insert the disk you’d like to copy and open Disk Utility.  Disk Utility is located in the Utilities folder which is inside the Applications folder.

Once its opened, you’ll see that there’s a sidebar on the left, very similar to other applications in OS X.  In that sidebar, you’ll see all your hard drives, external drives, and disk drives.  If you’ve already inserted the CD, you should see the disk listed there as well.  Click once on it.

What we’re going to now is to make a ‘Disk Image’ of the CD.  That basically means we’re going to take a picture of exactly what’s on the disc and save it so we can use it in the future, sort of like lifting comic strips up with Silly Putty.  To do this, we just click the New Image button at the top of the screen.  Its going to open a dialog box asking us where we want to save this image.  If you’re only copying this once and will never need it again, you can just put it on the desktop and delete it later, but if it’s a disk that you’ll probably want to copy over and over again down the road, save it in Documents (or other meaningful location) so you can access it later.  Click Save and here we go.

This part might take some time, so feel free to grab a coffee or something.  Let’s say you’ve got 10-15 minutes.

Once that step is complete (and we’ve had our morning Latte) we can eject the original disk and put in the new, blank disk that we’re going to copy to.  Your blank media should be a CD-R or DVD-R and (in my opinion) not made by Memorex.

Once the new disk is in, it will show up in the sidebar, but what we really want to look for is the image we made a moment ago.  It should also be listed in the sidebar now with the name we gave it ending with ‘.dmg’.  Click once on the name and click the Burn button at the top of the screen.

Go get another coffee and you’ll be finished when your return!  Don’t forget to delete the Disk Image if you’re not going to need it again and, for the love of bananas, label your new disk!