.dmg from PC to Mac

[OddLittleAnimal]

Is it possible, and preferably easy, to download .dmg files using a PC (evil) and transfer it to a Mac?

I've got both a mac and a PC at work, but only the PC has internet access. I recently was given a wonderfully outdated Lexmark X83 to use for scanning on the mac, however the software for it was lost. Everything I find to download for it is a disk image, so needless to say, that won't work.

Any suggestions?

[tlarkin]

yes it will work. Just transfer it to a thumb drive or external HD or burn the dmg to a dvd etc

[trevor]

Agreed. A .dmg file will download just fine on a PC and then transfer to the Mac. That's one reason .dmg was invented, even though Mac users were previously accustomed to .img files for disk images(which were dual-forked). .Dmg files are single forked, and so work fine with no modification on PCs or downloaded from the internet.

In fact, anything that can be downloaded from the internet will not be changed by downloading it on a Windows box and transferring the file unchanged to a Mac. That's because the Internet, like Windows*, does not understand multiple forks. So any file put up on the internet for download has already been reduced to a single fork in some way.

For example, in the olden days if you wanted to put a(n) .img file onto the internet for download (and remember, .img files are dual-forked), you would need to encode it in some way to include both forks before making it available for download. This was previously done with .hqx and .bin formats, for example. And you could download that .hqx file on a PC, transfer the .hqx to a Mac, and then decode the .hqx to the dual-forked .img file using software such as Stuffit Expander. But the point is that if it was available on the internet for download, it was already single-forked in it's current form, and would not suffer going through a Windows PC.

Trevor



* Actually, the NTFS file system, which is the default filesystem for recent versions of Windows, can handle multiple forks with no problem. But this feature of NTFS, though available, is never used as far as I know, making it as good as not supported.