1. How to burn Lion InstallESD.dmg to Bootable DVDhttp://www.l2pages.org/install-lion-on-lenovo-g770-i5-sandy-bridge-laptop.html.
2. With Mountain Lion's InstallESD.dmg file copied to the Desktop, you're ready to burn a bootable DVD of the installer. Insert a blank DVD into the Mac's optical drive. If a notice asks you what to do with the blank DVD, select Ignore.
3. However, in that case, because the Mountain Lion InstallESD.dmg file wasn't too far over 4.35 GB - maybe 4.60 GB perhaps - it was still able to fit on a single-sided DVD. In this case, considering the size of El Capitan at 6+ GB, it doesn't seem possible to use a single-sided DVD, and I don't have any dual layer DVD's available at the moment.

Jul 25, 2012 I tried burning the InstallESD.dmg file to a DVD so that I may do a clean install like I did with Lion. But Disk Utility says the mountain lion image is too big to burn!! HTF am I going to do a clean install now?!!!! The method is from the Egg Freckles website. A tradition/common method of crerating a DVD for OS x.

Make a bootable image copy of OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion after downloading the App from the store but before installing on your drive. Copy the image to a local drive or make a bootable external disk or DVD.

After downloading the Mountain Lion.App from the store aka “Install Mac OS X Mountain Lion”, find it in the /Applications directory, control click it to bring up a contextual menu and select “Show Package Contents” from the menu.

show package contents

This brings up a Contents folder, from here navigate to Contents/Shared Support/InstallESD.dmg, and thats the disk image to burn, it contains all the goodies.

Double click it, you can skip the verifying process, then the disk image mounts as a volume in the sidebar.

Image to Bootable DVD

Select the mounted volume in the sidebar then either click on the burn icon if you have it set up or choose the option from the File menu, pop in a blank DVD and thats a job done.

make-a-bootable-mountain-lion-image

You can also use /Utilities/Disk Utility to do the same thing, just launch Disk Utility, highlight the InstallESD.dmg and burn.

Copy to Local Drive

To keep a separate image of the dmg, option drag a copy to your desktop, this will make a copy of the InstallESD.dmg leaving the original Lion app intact.

Image to a Bootable External Disk

To make a bootable image to a drive instead of a disk, you need to do a restore in Disk Utility, select the InstallESD.dmg as the source and the disk volume as the destination. Enusure that the destination volume is correctly formatted as HFS+ Extended Journaled. Click “Restore”.

If you haven’t got the Mountain Lion App to start with and can’t re-download it from the App store, you can still make a partial boot drive from the hidden Recovery Partition, check it out.

Hint author here. I'll agree that in most cases you would be better off using a USB flash drive (8 gig drives cost practically nothing these days.) In my case, my employer asked that I create some bootable DVDs, and I didn't want to have to order a bunch of dual-layers. I'm sure there are others in similar circumstances.

I haven't tried the script, but it probably won't work in bash without properly escaping and/or quoting the paths with spaces on them.

You're absolutely right - good catch. The paths were fully escaped when I submitted the hint, but it looks like the backslashes got stripped out after submission.
I'll see about getting it fixed. In the meantime, you can download the escaped version here:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10577704/create-mountain-lion-dvd.zip

I've fixed it.

Typhoon14 said:
'but it looks like the backslashes got stripped out after submission.'
Were they back slashes, or forward slashes?

deleted

Burn Mountain Lion Dmg To Dvd Converter

Burn Mac Os X Lion Dmg To Dvd Windows

I had the install app in a Downloads folder. You will need to change that reference to where your copy of the app is located. This ran in Terminal, after I saved the text as 'MLresize.sh', using nano, and ran on the file.

(I've got a lot of blank DVDs. And they won't get zapped by lightning like my Base Station did.)

The script ran in a few minutes, much less time than actually burning the DVD.
I just dropped the created .dmg file into Disk Utility, selected it, and clicked on burn.
After burning, the disc shows in System Preferences->Startup Disk as bootable.
Although I haven't tried it out yet.

How exactly does this work? How can you reduce the uncompressed size of an image without losing any data?

The image itself has a fixed size of 4.75 GB, but contains only 4.35 GB of data. All we're doing is trimming the free space.

So you can't just use Image/Resize in Disk Utility? (I'd try it, but I don't have Mountain Lion.)

Resize only works for read/write disk images, so, no.

Burn Mountain Lion Dmg To Dvd Conversion

I just copy/pasted the stuff for terminal, not bothering with the bash and everything worked as advertised. Verifying burnt disc now. Thanks!!

@kirkmc Why do you need Lion DiskMaker? Can't you just restore the InstallESD image in Install X Mountain Lion/Contents/SharedSupport using Disk Utility?
I have an installer on a USB and an SDHC Card using the restore method.

@derekJAB,
you can in fact restore InstallESD.dmg. Just remember to mount the dmg for Mountain Lion.
If you don't, disk utility will throw you an error.

for somehow I need to add 'sleep' before detach to avoid resource busy
#! /bin/bash
# 2012-08-07 01 prw from Mac OS X Hints web site...
# added backslash before spaces in image names...
# Should be run on /Volumes/yourhddvolumename not on the SSD
# 2012-08-07 02 prw References are all relative, not absolute. So SSD it is.
# 2012-09-13 03 JFOC adding some sleep to avoid resource busy on detach
# Remove any old copies of the DVD image before we begin.
rm -f /private/tmp/Mountain Lion DVD Image read-write.dmg
echo 'Creating DVD Image...'
hdiutil create -size 4.2g -volname 'Mac OS X Install ESD' /private/tmp/Mountain Lion DVD Image read-write.dmg -fs HFS+ -layout SPUD
hdiutil attach -nobrowse /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/admin/Downloads/Mountain Lion 10.8/InstallESD.dmg
hdiutil attach -nobrowse /private/tmp/Mountain Lion DVD Image read-write.dmg
echo 'Copying Mountain Lion to new image...'
cp -pRv /Volumes/Mac OS X Install ESD/* /Volumes/Mac OS X Install ESD 1/
sleep 10
hdiutil detach /Volumes/Mac OS X Install ESD 1
sleep 10
hdiutil detach /Volumes/Mac OS X Install ESD
sleep 10
echo 'Converting to read-only...'
hdiutil convert /private/tmp/Mountain Lion DVD Image read-write.dmg -format UDZO -o ~/Mountain Lion DVD ImageLion.dmg
sleep 10
rm -f /private/tmp/Mountain Lion DVD Image read-write.dmg
echo 'Image Creation Complete. Please burn '~/Mountain Lion DVD ImageLion.dmg' to a DVD using Disk Utility.'
open ~/
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you do want to get the Mountain Lion installer InstallESD.dmg to fit on a single layer DVD, you can use the overburn feature of hdiutil in Mac OS X.
AFTER inserting a blank DVD, bring up terminal, navigate to the dmg folder and type:
hdiutil burn InstallESD.dmg
Depending on your brand of DVD your mileage may vary.

You can infact burn the installer to a single layer DVD, using a feature called overburn. This is much simpler than it sounds..
AFTER inserting a blank DVD, bring up terminal, navigate to the dmg folder and type:
hdiutil burn InstallESD.dmg
Depending on your brand of DVD your mileage may vary. It's not unusual to get errors after finishing the burn but as long as the Finishing Burn message is shown, the disc will function as expected.

I think using any of these methods will cause the image to have a different checksum than the original. If that's not important to you, don't fret.
$ man hdiutil
-[no]optimizeimage do [not] optimize filesystem for burning.
Optimization can reduce the size of an HFS or
HFS+ volume to the size of the data contained
on the volume. This option will change what
is burned such that the disc will have a dif-
ferent checksum than the image it came from.
The default is to burn all blocks of the disk
image (minus any trailing Apple_Free).