Windows and I don’t have a very friendly relationship. Over the course of a year, I might reinstall my copy of Windows XP SP 2 half a dozen times because, inevitably, some .dll, .sys, or .act file has managed to ruin it for everyone by going and getting corrupted. This has happened so many times that I now have to call Microsoft every time I want to activate Windows (twice for each install, since I also use VMWare) and listen to a bot read off a thousand-digit number in groups of five.

The most recent argument between Windows and me happened on Tuesday; an annoying freeze led to a nightmarish six hour battle. Sadly, Windows emerged the victor by dying completely and thoroughly. Time for a reinstall, which means tracking down all of the .dll, .sys, and .act files that I need…

As you may know, Boot Camp comes with drivers to increase compatibility with Apple hardware. During the betas, they were stored in a disk image inside the application bundle; in Leopard, the drivers are stored on the Leopard install DVD. The DVD is a hybrid disc, meaning it has partitions for both Windows and Mac OS X. By default, OS X will only mount the HFS+ partition (containing the installer), and Windows will only mount the ISO 9660 partition (containing the Boot Camp drivers).

So if you don’t have your install disc and no writable DVD-DL is within arm’s reach, is it possible to get OS X to mount the ISO 9660 partition from the ADC disk image and copy the drivers to a thumb drive? Indeed it is.

(As an aside, you can view the partition map of the disk image by running hdiutil pmap2 leopard_9a581_userdvd.dmg)

If we use hdiutil to attach the image as a block device, it’s possible to get the ISO 9660 part to mount by using the cd9660.util program.

$ hdiutil attach leopard_9a581_userdvd.dmg -nomount
expected   CRC32 $0108CBDC
/dev/disk3          	Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/disk3s1        	Apple_partition_map
/dev/disk3s2        	Apple_Driver_ATAPI
/dev/disk3s3        	Apple_HFS
$ mkdir /Volumes/Drivers
$ /System/Library/Filesystems/cd9660.fs/cd9660.util -m disk3 /Volumes/Drivers

And when you’re done:

$ umount /Volumes/Drivers
$ rm -Rf /Volumes/Drivers

That’s all for today. If you need me, I’ll be on the phone with Microsoft…