Greetings everyone

I am really left off right now. I wanted to expand the size of my OSX partition so i made an image of it using Disk Utility from iDeneb 10.5.5 disk (i booted and opened the Disk Utility) and that created a DMG image file which i saved to another HFS+ partition on the same drive.

I deleted the OSX partition and reformated it with osx extended journaled and booted again with iDeneb 10.5.5 to restore the partition image to the newly formated mac os extended journaled partition. I select the DMG and as destination the new partition, click restore and BOOM, the disk utility says:

Could not validate source - error 254

What can i do? I've encountered the same error message before when trying to restore a vanilla OSX dvd to a hard drive partition. I never figured out why this is happening and im really left off right now because i have valuable files into this partition (which seems to be just a DMG file now..)

Im desperately seeking for assistance

Two things to try:

Make sure you select "Erase" for the partition you're trying to restore to.

If that doesn't help, look in the Disk Utility menu for an option like "Check image for restore" or something like that and see if that helps.

Checked those 2 but neither one helped.

Also i tried using dd if of with if= the path to the dmg and of= the /dev/disk0s2 which is the partition i want to restore. The disk was busy all night but after 7 hours i checked it and the command hasnt stopped yet. I stopped it, booted with Parted Magic and the partition was unknown and couldnt get accessed..

Any tips on dd?

I doubt you can dd the dmg anywhere, its a not a bit by bit image of the partition, it surely has some header, metadata, crc32, etc. and most likely its compressed.
The original message suggests something is wrong with the actual dmg, did you try to mount it after creating it? Or try to open it with some other tool?

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AsRock P45TS | C2D E8200 | GeForce 8600GTS
Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1 + Windows 7 Ultimate 6.1.7600 + Fedora 11

Hmmm im also trying dd again from a temporary iDeneb installation but i think you're right. The dmg wasnt created from dd but from disk utility so its definetly compressed (i choosed it) not to mention any header or crc that its 99% to be there.

No i didnt try to mount it right after i created it. I just deleted the partition and booted installation disk to run Disk Utility and restore it to the new, bigger partition.

The same thing happened to me in the past with a vanilla installation disk. If i moved the dmg of the installation disk somewhere else and tried to restore it to a partition it would fail with the SAME message as my partition image.

It has to be something about stamps, date modification dates or i dont know what else that makes the disk utility unable to verify its source...

When i try to mount the dmg the message i get is no mountable file systems.. Also Pacifist failed to open the dmg because it couldn't mount it..

If there is NO way i can restore the image to a partition itself, can i at least somehow access the dmg to obtain some valuable files i have there? :/

Plus... Disk utility can convert the image, if i choose a no compression image, would dd bit by bit copy work?

Also i dont know why, but dd is reeeaally slow. Activity Monitor shows a disk write activity of 2MB/s and that means it could take 12 hours to copy the whole image to the partition.. Is that normal?

If I choose partition from the Disk Utility tab when i have selected the image and tell it to scheme 1 partition with MBR and Mac Os Extended Journaled will this erase ALL the data inside the image?

Now it is clear that the thing that does not go well is that the image does not have a format but its possibly a block by block copy of the volume here is what asr says to me:

sudo asr restore --source /Volumes/MACCLN/MACOSX.DMG --target /dev/disk0s2 --erase --format HFS+ --noverify
Validating target...done
Validating source...
Could not detect format of volume on device /dev/disk1
Could not validate source - error 254

What can i do? How can i restore a block by block image? Is there any way to properly do this?