No version of the Windows operating system supports the DMG format out of the box. As you may know, the DMG file is an OS X disk image file and is kept under the Mac OS X operating system. Third-party tools are required to open DMG files on a Windows PC.
Those of you who have spent most of your time on Mac OS X will know that most are used to install apps on your Mac. In other words, the apps we download to install on Mac OS X use the .DMG extension and can be installed easily by double-clicking on the file.
Although there are a few handy options for opening or extracting a DMG file in Windows, we will share the three best tools for handling DMG files in a Windows environment.
DMG Extractor
DMG Extractor is probably the first and only tool exclusively designed to process DMG files in Windows. DMG Extractor is specially developed for DMG files. It can open encrypted .DMG files without converting them to another format.
RDMG Extractor supports raw DMG, Bzip2, Zlib, and Zero files.
The only catch with the free version of DMG Extractor is that it cannot open DMG files more than 4GB in size, but that shouldn’t be an issue for most users.
Using DMG Extractor is quite simple. After installing the software, right-click on the DMG file you want to open and then click the Open option to open the file with DMG Extractor. Alternatively, after launching DMG Extractor, click the Open button and select the DMG file with the selected DMG file’s contents.
To extract the DMG file, click the Extract button, and then choose the location to save the content.
HFSExplorer
Another free utility that you can install on a Windows machine to extract DMG files is HFS + Explorer. With HFSExplorer, you can open Mac-formatted disks and disk images in Windows.
While HFSExplorer is relatively easy to use, we have to mention that it is not as straightforward as DMG Extractor. You need to have Java SE Runtime Environment 5.0 or above installed to run HFSExplorer, and it doesn’t support all types of DMG formats, including DMG UDF format.
On the plus side, however, there is no size limit per file.
Here is how to use HFSExplorer to open a DMG file
Step 1: Download and install Java SE Runtime Environment version 5.0 and above.
Step 2: Visit this page to download HFSExplorer and run the setup to install.
Step 3: Run HFSExplorer, click the File menu and click the Load file system from the path to browse the DMF file.
If you came across a better solution to open DMG files in Windows, dos share with us in the comments.
7-Zip
Most computer users are familiar with the 7-Zip utility. If you haven’t used 7-Zip before, it’s a free tool used to compress and uncompress files. In addition to 7z, Zip, and RAR formats, 7-Zip also supports DMG format. However, it is essential to note that 7-Zip only supports decompressing DMG files.
