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Why am I getting notice that my archiving operations to 8GB+ disk images are failing with 'operator canceled' or 'image too large' errors under Mac OS X 10.3.9?

Apple introduced a bug in their disk image system under 10.3.9 that causes the failure of any disk image convert operations over 8GB in size. This bug didn't exist in OS X 10.3.0 to 10.3.8. Carbon Copy Cloner suffers the same problem when making disk image-based clones, and even Apple's Disk Utility can't convert images properly under 10.3.9.

I've no good evidence that simply replacing the failing 'Disk Utilities framework' component in Apple's 10.3.9 installation will cause things to start working again. Some folks report that having XCode makes a difference for the worse, and that without it things may work - though I've tested and found installing XCode makes no difference on my test systems.

This bug is not present in 10.4, nor have I seen it with any version of 10.3 prior to 10.3.9. It's strictly local to the released build of 10.3.9. Since Impression relies on Apple's tools to do its work regarding disk images, this is something I'll have to wait for them to fix.

Workarounds: At this time, I'm going to have to recommend that you only initiate backups under 8GB in size under OS X 10.3.9 if you're planning on saving them to disk images. Dividing your backups into several smaller ones should do the trick; alternatively if you can somehow get 10.3.8 back on your system you could run full-size, disk image-based backups with no issue. Impression's DVD and CD-based backups exhibit no issues under 10.3.9 and are also a recommended workaround. Lastly, you could instigate a DVD-based backup of your 8GB+ data set and use Impression's 'Save Image' button for each disk to save out a set of 4.7GB disk images.

ImpsAnswer 102, last modified: 2006.02.06


© Copyright 1998-2006 Stephen W. Elliott, All rights reserved.