On the home page for Scott Kelby's book Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers, one can download several hundred megabytes of sample files. Strangely enough, many of the sample "DNG" images cannot be opened in Adobe CS4 Bridge or Photoshop - at least not unless you have Lightroom installed. It turns out that many of them, like SaveYourPresets1.dng or SaveYourPresets2.dng are not dng files at all, but psd files with the wrong extension. Funnily enough, many of the correct dng files contain features that make them incompatible with Mac OS X 10.5.6, which in theory opens dng files.
I take this as yet another proof that dng is not a more compatible or safer format than many other raw formats, even though it probably is due to some bug in Lightroom.
It may seem strange that Scott managed to miss this, but Lightroom reads the files without problems, and if you double click on them within Lightroom a copy of them opens in Photoshop, so it looks like they are dng files, even though they are not.
How to fix it? Simply change the extension from dng to psd, and you will be able to open the files in programs that support the extension.
How I figured out that they were PhotoShop files? I opened the files in the Terminal text editor less, and noticed that they contain the code 8BIM, which is a Macintosh Photoshop extension.
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