Comments on: Snow Leopard’s “Disk Utility” can’t create encrypted image

By: N. guin

N. guin — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:21:04 +0000

Thanks A. Magno for the method to format HDD.
It works !! many thanks

By: A. Magno

A. Magno — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 23:00:36 +0000

Administrator. James is right. I just did it and works. The drive where you are going to record the image has to be formatted with mac system. HFS.

The disk has to have enough space. Check it.
Has to be formatted for MAC System.
I Disk Utility you click Erase> click The HDD the you want to format. Choose the system. End click erase.

By: Jones

Jones — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 04:16:17 +0000

I am attempting the same thing, and tried compressed and still no luck. Any ideas?

By: Administrator

Administrator — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:33:27 +0000

@James: I'm not sure whether what you write is actually true. Remember that I just changed the image type (from encrypted to compressed), and that made it work! In both cases, the final size of the image was not known in advance (because you can't predict the "output" size of encrypted or compressed data, usually compression occurs before encryption is applied). Mind you, I did not change the filesystem of the target drive!

By: James

James — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:28:00 +0000

I encountered the same error while trying to backup my existing installation prior to installing Snow Leopard. The problem, I found, was the MS-DOS formatting on the USB drive and when I reformatted it with HFS+, the error went away. I suspect its memory mapping a file of the size necessary for the image, which due to file size limitations on the file system is returning and error but as its a size error on a memory mapping its interpreted as a memory error not a file size error. Hooray FAT32.