Disk Image Formats

IPSW files contain three disk image (.dmg) files in addition to the IMG3 images for the NOR and on older models, unencrypted files for the restore process. The three disk images are the update ramdisk, the restore ramdisk, and the main filesystem.

The main filesystem .dmg disk image (the largest .dmg file) is decrypted (with VFDecrypt) to an UDZO .dmg disk image containing additional checksums.

UDZO Image Format
The UDZO Image is an UDIF zlib-compressed read-only image which can be mounted on Mac OS X. UDZO Images can be converted to read/write UDRW Images with hdiutil on Mac OSX:

hdiutil convert -format UDRW udzo.dmg -o udrw.dmg

To add checksums of the data in the provided UDZO Image and store them in the image asr on Mac OSX can be used:

asr -imagescan udzo.dmg

UDRW Image Format
The UDRW Image is an UDIF read/write image which can be mounted on Mac OS X. UDRW Images can be converted to zlib-compressed read-only UDZO Images with hdiutil on Mac OS X:

hdiutil convert -format UDZO udrw.dmg -o udzo.dmg