It's easy when you know how… Creating and ISO image from a CD or DVD on and iMac running OSX

As the title says, it is easy when you know how, but damn difficult when you don’t.  

It’s things like this that annoy me about operating systems.  If you want to backup a CD or DVD to an ISO image file, in my own opinion, you should be able to just CTRL+Click on the mounted CD and then select “create ISO”.  (I am sure you can probably script it, but this should be a standard feature for a user).

Anyway…   here is how to do it in OSX…

1. Put your CD or DVD in the drive.
2. Open the built in “Disk Utility” application.
3. Highlight the CD or DVD in Disk Utility and select “New Image” from the top bar.
4. On the popup window, type a name for your image and select “DVD/CD Master” from the Image Format dropdown.  Click Save and the image is created.
5. Rename the .CDR file to .ISO and you are done 🙂

I sure hope this information is more Googable now!