hdid
NAME
hdid - HDI driver backing store service SYNOPSIS
hdid [ options ] image DESCRIPTION
Historically, hdid has been the user-level process which handles the loading and decompression of disk image data for the HDI disk image driver in the Mac OS X kernel. With 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 OS X version 10.3, hdid calls the DiskImages.framework and its helpers take care of any out-of-kernel image serving duties. Thus hdid exists primarily for backwards compatibility. Generally, hdiutil attach should be favored over hdid. The DiskImages framework supports a variety of flat-file and dual-fork image formats, including read/write, read-only, and read-only compressed formats (which it decompresses on the fly). It automatically decodes AppleSingle and MacBinary file formats and is capable of mounting most images directly from http:// URLs. hdiutil detach or diskutil eject should be used to detach (aka "eject") images attached to the system via hdid. 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 hdiutil(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 (unfortunately, 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, volumes automatically mount on non-managed systems regardless of whether anyone was logged in on console. Image-based filesystems can also be manually mounted after attaching the image with -nomount. 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. ARGUMENTS
-help show available options -shadow [ <shadowfile> ] 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 written, the writes will be redirected to the shadow file. If not specified, -shadow defaults to <imagename>.shadow. If the shadow file does not exist, it is created. -readonly Attach the image read only. Has no effect on read-only images. -readwrite 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. -nomount Suppress automatic mounting of any filesystems in the image. This will result in /dev entries being created and (for non-kernel-attached images) a process in the background, but no volumes will be mounted. -notremovable 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). -encryption [ <crypto method> ] 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 -encryption comes directly before the image name on the command line. -stdinpass causes hdid to read a null-terminated passphrase from its standard 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. -passphrase <passphrase> 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). -passphrase has been deprecated. -imagekey <key>=<value> Specify a key/value pair for the disk image recognition and creation system. See hdiutil(1) for more information. -drivekey <keyname>=<value> Specify a key/value pair for the IOHDIXHDDrive object created (shows up in the IOKit registry of devices which is viewable with ioreg(8)). -section subspec Attach a subset of the disk image. subspec is any of <offset>, <first-last>, or <start,count>. All sector numbers are zerobased and ranges are inclusive. -kernel attempt to attach the image in-kernel even if this is not the default behavior for this type of image. If the image can not be attached, no attempt will be made to revert to attaching it with a user process. -nokernel 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. -plist 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. -verbose verbose output when attaching an image -debug diagnostic output when attaching an image -quiet Don't print out resulting /dev entries and filesystems. Also do not print any errors. hdid's exit status will indicate whether the attach was successful. EXAMPLES
$ 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, redirecting all write operations to the shadow file master.dmg.shadow. $ hdid http://my.webserver.com/master.img -shadow /tmp/mastershadowfile Present master.img to the filesystems for potential mounting, redirecting 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://<sectors> will attach a ram disk that can be mounted and used after being formatted 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` newfs_hfs $mydev mkdir /tmp/mymount mount -t hfs $mydev /tmp/mymount OUTPUT
Unless -plist is specified, hdid 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 created. The second column will contain the partition type if the image contained a partition map. The third column will contain the mountpoint if the particular /dev entry was mounted. If hdid 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. Mounting Images via HTTP In addition to mounting images from local or remote mounted filesystems, one can also mount images from HTTP servers. For flat images (UDIF images, or AppleSingle/MacBinary encoded NDIF image files) mounting a image is a matter of passing the http:// URL to hdid: hdid http://server.company.com/Images/stuff.dmg 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 supported. Such dual-fork files must be moved or copied using the Finder, ditto -rsrc, or some other resource-fork-aware tool. Properly copied dual-fork files on a UFS volume have a ._filename file in addition to the filename 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 hdid will determine if it is necessary to access the secondary file. It should be noted that some web servers (Apache in particular) do not support byte-range requests beyond 2 or 4 GB and thus files larger than that will not be accessible over HTTP (read/write images may attach, but will not be fully accessible). Segmented images do work correctly over HTTP (assuming they are named properly) and can be used to work around the limitation. Accessing dual fork images on HFS+ filesystems via HTTP is only supported if the HTTP server is on a Mac OS X system. It is possible that some options on the web server could disable access to the resource fork on an HFS+ volume. 10.3 security updates have disabled access to /..namedfork/ paths it may be necessary to tweak web server settings if to successfully serve dual-fork images from HFS filesystems. Browsing images via HTTP is much more pleasant if the server settings are modified to be more friendly to highly-persistent clients. In particular for Apache, MaxKeepAliveRequests should be increased significantly beyond 100 or set to 0 (unlimited) and KeepAliveTimeout should be boosted to at least 30 (seconds). Increasing the number of simultaneous clients may also be desirable because of the increased delay before clients are forcibly disconnected. 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 download the files rather than try to display them. For apache, you add the extensions to the appropriate line in /etc/httpd/mime.types. SEE ALSO
hdiutil(1), load_hdi(8), ditto(8), diskutil(8), diskarbitrationd(8), ioreg(8) 25 June 2002 hdid(8)