Run full OS X installer for another drive without rebooting

Jan 27, '10 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: V.K.

If you ever need to install (or reinstall) OS X on a drive other than your current boot drive, you can do it without rebooting. (Normally, when you launch the OS X installer, it reboots your machine before starting the installation.) With this hint, you can do the whole install process while booted normally from your current drive -- so you can keep working while the install is going on.

To do that, just launch the Unix executable for the installer application on the DVD, by running the following command in Terminal:

sudo /Volumes/Snow\ leopard\ Install\ DVD/System/Installation/CDIS/Mac\ OS\ X\ Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/Mac\ OS\ X\ Installer
To make it work even faster, you can clone the install DVD to a small partition on one of your drives, and then modify the above command to point to the path to the installer application on that partition.

This older hint does the same thing, with one key difference: This method provides essentially the same GUI interface you get when you boot from the DVD. This lets you run the full system restore from Time Machine from the Utilities menu, for example. I don't know any other way to do that without booting from the DVD.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100122081044636