Manual Pages for UNIX Darwin command on man hdid

hdid(8) hdid(8)

NAME

hdid - HDI driver backing store service

SYNOPSIS

hhddiidd [ options ] image

DESCRIPTION

Historically, hhddiidd has been the user-level process handling the loading

and decompression of disk image data for the hard disk image (HDI) driver in the Mac OS X kernel. With Mac OS X version 10.2 and later,

certain read/write images and 10.2+-generated zlib-compressed (UDZO)

images attach in-kernel without a persistent user process.

With Mac OS X version 10.3, hhddiidd calls the DiskImages.framework and its

helpers take care of any out-of-kernel image serving duties. As of Mac

OS X 10.4, hhddiidd calls through to hhddiiuuttiill aattttaacchh. hhddiidd exists primarily for backwards compatibility. Generally, hhddiiuuttiill aattttaacchh should be used

instead of hdid. This man page continues to document certain DiskIm-

ages features that are not tool-specific.

The DiskImages framework supports a variety of flat-file and dual-fork

image formats, including read/write, read-only, and read-only com-

pressed formats (which it decompresses on the fly). It automatically

decodes AppleSingle and MacBinary file formats and is capable of mount-

ing most images directly from http:// URLs. hhddiiuuttiill ddeettaacchh or ddiisskkuuttiill eejjeecctt should be used to detach (aka "eject") images attached to the system via hhddiidd. Beware that an image you have created and attached is considered an unknown removable device. For HFS filesystems on such a device, being

unknown to the system means that the on-disk ownership of files and

directories are initially ignored. On 10.2, the owner values were dynamically replaced with the owner of /dev/console and the group unknown (gid 99). On 10.3, the group remains unknown, but the owner is whoever is currently accessing the file (joe sees that he owns files when he looks at the volume; mary sees that she owns files when she looks). Owners can be enabled for a particular volume permanently (see

disktool/"get info" in the Finder) or temporarily (see EXAMPLES section

of hhddiiuuttiill(1)). Aside from whether owners are enabled, being removable means that disk arbitration will mount any volumes with special options such as nosuid. The error "no mountable filesystems" generally means that there is no

filesystem in the image or that any filesystem is corrupt. Unfortu-

nately, read-only device images made from mounted journaled volumes

will not mount because the journal can't be replayed. It should be noted, however, that the error was common on older systems when remotely logged in to a machine with no one logged in on console. Disk arbitration wouldn't mount removable media until the SystemUIServer

process was running. On 10.2 systems, 'disktool -c `id -u`' would

allow image-based volumes to mount in such situations. With 10.3, vol-

umes automatically mount on non-managed systems regardless of whether

anyone is logged in on console. Image-based filesystems can also be

manually mounted after attaching the image with -nnoommoouunntt.

Please see the section below on setting up HTTP image servers if you plan to regularly mount images from web servers or are wondering why a particular image isn't mounting over HTTP. AARRGGUUMMEENNTTSS

-hheellpp show available options

-sshhaaddooww [ <> ]

Use a shadow file in conjunction with the data in the image. This prevents modification of the original image and allows

read-only images to be attached read/write. When blocks are

being read from the image, blocks present in the shadow file

override blocks in the base image. When blocks are being writ-

ten, the writes will be redirected to the shadow file. If not

specified, -shadow defaults to .shadow. If the

shadow file does not exist, it is created.

-rreeaaddoonnllyy

Attach the image read only. Has no effect on read-only images.

-rreeaaddwwrriittee

Attach the image read/write. Has no effect on read-only (or

compressed) images. Used in some cases where a read/write image

might default to being attached read-only.

-nnoommoouunntt

Suppress automatic mounting of any filesystems in the image.

This will result in /dev entries being created and (for non-ker-

nel-attached images) a process in the background, but no volumes

will be mounted.

-nnoottrreemmoovvaabbllee

Make the image appear to the system as a fixed disk. A reboot will be required to cleanly detach the image, though filesystems can be unmounted and remounted. This option requires root access, e.g. via sudo(8).

-eennccrryyppttiioonn [[ <> ]]

This option specifies a particular encrypted encoding. The default CEncryptedEncoding automatically recognizes its images so this option should rarely be needed. Be careful what you are

asking for if the argument to -eennccrryyppttiioonn comes directly before

the image name on the command line.

-ssttddiinnppaassss

causes hhddiidd to read a null-terminated passphrase from its stan-

dard input. ^@ (control-@) can be typed to explicitly insert

the terminator. This option is designed for automation in which

standard input would be attached to a file or pipe. -ppaasssspphhrraassee

<> This option is provided for automation purposes but is very insecure as the passphrase value will be visible in the

output of ps(1) (and thus to other users). -ppaasssspphhrraassee has been

deprecated.

-iimmaaggeekkeeyy <>==<>

Specify a key/value pair for the disk image recognition and cre-

ation system. See hdiutil(1) for more information.

-ddrriivveekkeeyy <>==<>

Specify a key/value pair for the IOHDIXHDDrive object created (shows up in the IOKit registry of devices which is viewable with ioreg(8)).

-sseeccttiioonn subspec

Attach a subset of the disk image. subspec is any of ,

, or . All sector numbers are zero-

based and ranges are inclusive.

-kkeerrnneell

hand the image directly to the IOHDIXController module in the

kernel even if this image would not normally be sent "in-ker-

nel." If the image cannot be attached, no attempt will be made to attach it with a user process.

-nnookkeerrnneell

attach the image with a persistent process instead of attaching

in-kernel, even if the default for this type of image is to

attach in-kernel. Use hdiutil(1)'s imageinfo verb to determine

if an image will default to mounting in-kernel.

-pplliisstt output a plist describing the image and system entities (dev

entries, mount points, etc) that were created as a result of attaching the given image.

-vveerrbboossee

verbose output when attaching an image

-ddeebbuugg diagnostic output when attaching an image

-qquuiieett Don't print out resulting /dev entries and filesystems. Also do

not print any errors. hhddiidd's exit status will indicate whether the attach was successful. EEXXAAMMPPLLEESS

$ hdid funstuff.img

Present funstuff.img as a device so that its filesystems can be mounted.

$ hdid master.dmg -shadow

Present master.dmg to the filesystems for potential mounting, redirect-

ing all write operations to the shadow file master.dmg.shadow.

$ hdid http://my.webserver.com/master.img -shadow /tmp/master-

shadowfile

Present master.img to the filesystems for potential mounting, redirect-

ing all write operations to the shadow file mastershadowfile in /tmp.

The shadow file can be on any mounted read/write filesystem - keep in

mind the consequences of using a remote filesystems (NFS, AFP) for such shadow files.

hdid -nomount ram://

will attach a ram disk that can be mounted and used after being format-

ted with a newfs utility or Disk Utility.app. A sector is 512 bytes. A small shell script to create and mount a ram disk:

#!/bin/sh

NUMSECTORS=128000

mydev=`hdid -nomount ram://$NUMSECTORS`

newfshfs $mydev

mkdir /tmp/mymount

mount -t hfs $mydev /tmp/mymount

OOUUTTPPUUTT

Unless -pplliisstt is specified, hhddiidd returns one line of output per /dev

entry created. Each line contains up to three tab-delimited columns.

The first column always contains the full path to the /dev entry cre-

ated. The second column will contain the partition type if the image

contained a partition map. The third column will contain the mount-

point if the particular /dev entry was mounted. If hhddiidd is asked to attach an image that is already attached, it will attempt to return the usual information for the attached image, as if it had just been attached. However, if there are unmounted partitions on the attached image, they will not be remounted. MMoouunnttiinngg IImmaaggeess vviiaa HHTTTTPP

In addition to mounting images from local or remote mounted filesys-

tems, one can also mount images from HTTP servers without downloading

the entire image. For flat images (UDIF images, or AppleSingle/MacBi-

nary encoded NDIF image files) mounting an image is a matter of passing

the http:// URL to hdid:

hdid http://server.company.com/Images/stuff.dmg

It should be noted that some web servers (Apache in particular) do not

support byte-range requests beyond 2 (Apache 1.x) or 4 GB (Apache 2.x)

and thus image files larger than those sizes will not be accessible

over HTTP. Read/write images may attach, but will not be fully acces-

sible. Segmented images do work correctly over HTTP (assuming they are

named properly) and can be used to work around the file size limita-

tion. Browsing images via HTTP is much more pleasant if the server settings

are modified to be more friendly to highly-persistent clients. In par-

ticular for Apache, MaxKeepAliveRequests should be increased signifi-

cantly beyond 100 or set to 0 (unlimited) and KeepAliveTimeout should

be boosted to at least 30 (seconds). Increasing the number of simulta-

neous clients may also be desirable because of the increased delay before clients are forcibly disconnected. If the image to be served via HTTP is a dual fork NDIF image that is

not encoded into a flat-file format such as AppleSingle and the HTTP

server is running on Mac OS X, dual fork files may be detected and sup-

ported. Such dual-fork files must be moved or copied using the Finder,

or some other resource-fork-aware tool. Properly copied dual-fork

files on a UFS volume have a .filename file in addition to the file-

name you see in the Finder (i.e. stuff.img would also have .stuff.img in the same directory).

In either case, one would specify the URL to the data fork, and DiskIm-

ages will determine if it is necessary to access the secondary file.

Accessing dual fork images on HFS+ filesystems via HTTP is only sup-

ported if the HTTP server is on a Mac OS X system. It is possible that the web server's configuration could prevent access to the resource fork. For example, Mac OS X 10.3 security updates have disabled access to the /..namedfork/ paths necessary to access resource forks on HFS. Thus it may be necessary to tweak web server settings to successfully

serve dual-fork images.

While it is not directly related to mounting via hdid(1), informing

your web server that '.dmg' (and others) are extensions associated with

the MIME type application/octet-stream will allow web browsers to down-

load the files rather than try to display them. For apache, you add the extensions to the appropriate line in /etc/httpd/mime.types.