I recently got a new 13″ Retina Display Macbook Pro which does not have a SuperDrive. At the time this seemed pretty insignificant given that I couldn’t think of a time that I ever really use CD’s or DVD’s in it. I figured for any software installs, such as Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, I’d just use Remote Disc with my Mac Pro and install it that way.
It turns out there are a number of discs that do not work with Remote Disc, including music CD’s, video DVD’s and some copy protected data CD’s/DVD’s. CS 5.5 is one of these. I could not get it to work via Remote Disc. My Macbook would see it, I could ask the Mac Pro for permission to use it, the Mac Pro could grant permission to use it, and it would start to open it. I did this about 15-20 times. Each time it got to different stages of opening the disc. Sometimes it wouldn’t show everything, sometimes it showed the contents, sometimes I could even start the installer. Inevitably though, it would cease to be accessible relatively quickly. The error is:
The operation can’t be completed because the original item for “CS5_5 Design Prm 1″ can’t be found.
Replace “CS5_5 Design Prm 1″ with the name of your disc and you’ll have the same error.
After some searching around I found that this is a fairly common issue and is by design to protect certain content types, and presumably to protect revenue’s through the App Store and other download avenues.
This left me with a few options:
- See if I could find the same version of CS 5.5 for download from the Adobe website or somewhere else and install it with my serial number.
- Purchase or subscribe to the latest version of Creative Cloud; or
- Try and create a disk image of my disks and copy them across the network to install on the Macbook.
Given that 5.5 is not exactly old, I don’t particularly want to get the new version yet, and given that we are presently capped, a 4gb+ download is not ideal.
I decided to try and create a disk images. As long as there isn’t anything that Disk Utility doesn’t like about it, this is actually really easy.
Disk Utility is in Applications > Utilities / Other (depending on which version of OS X you have). Alternatively, do a Spotlight search for it and it will usually be the first result.
Once it’s open, select the disk from the list on the left and click “New Image” from the buttons along the top of the window.

Disk Utilities Window on OS X Snow Leopard
A dialog will pop-up asking you where to save it. After you choose a location it will go ahead and create a .dmg file for you. Once that is done, copy it across the network, or onto a USB drive and open it on the Macbook.
From there I was able to install it as if I had direct access to the original disk. This might not work with all disks, but it definitely worked for this one!
If Disk Utility has trouble creating the .dmg file, another option would be to try Burn for OS X, a third party disk burning/copying utility. There is a tutorial on how to create a .iso disk image using Burn here.