March 20, 2010

Ripping a TurboTax DVD image to an .iso file on a Mac

turbotax.jpg

I have a copy of TurboTax that I want to install on a Windows virtual machine. In order to do that I need to insert the DVD in the underlying host hardware first. Unfortunately that requires physical access to the host hardware which I don't have right now. Instead what I want to do is to send a software image (.iso file) of the DVD to the host machine over the network, have the host machine mount the .iso file and then my virtual machine will think the DVD is inserted in it's hardware. Further complicated matters is the fact that I have a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5.8.

Since the Mac mounts the disk in a different way from the way Windows mounts the disk, I first need to make my Mac mount the disk like a Windows box would. Here is what I did based on this hint:

  1. I inserted the disk into my Mac
  2. executed:mount, to figure out which disk I was working with
  3. executed:sudo umount /Volume/TurboTax\ Premier\ 2009, to disconnect from the disk without ejecting it
  4. executed:mkdir /Volumes/Turbo.win, as a new mount point
  5. executed:mount_cd9660 -er /dev/disk2 /Volumes/Turbo.win, to mount the disk as a Windows box would.

Now I can cd to Turbo.win and see all the windows files that were hidden from me when I used the natural Mac mounting technique of inserting-the-disk-in-the-drive.

So I now I need to rip the DVD into an .iso file which I based on this hint

  1. execute: dd if=/dev/disk2 of=myFile.iso

Voilá all done. Then I compressed the file. Sent it across the network. Decompressed it. Mounted it, and installed TurboTax on my virtual machine.

A few cleanup steps are to eject the disk on my Mac. diskutil eject /dev/disk2, and to erase the mount point, rmdir /Volumes/Turbo.win

Posted by djp3 at March 20, 2010 10:58 AM | TrackBack (0)
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