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Create a hard-drive based OS X installer
Authored by: math0ne on Mar 28, '07 08:09:53PM
Like many people I'm sure i stumbled upon this when i couldn't get a mac to install OS X due to a funky connection somewhere between the cd-rom drive and the hard drive.

The install would always just fail somewhere thorough, and I tried with many drives. Here's what i did to get it to install.

  • 1. Boot off install disk
  • 2. Use Disk Utility to create two partitions: 1 main partition and 1 install partition (5gb)
  • 2. From the disk utility select the install cd
  • 3. Click "Create Image"
  • 4. Save the image on the main partition
  • 5. Then restore that image to the install partition you created.
  • 6. Select the install partition as the boot partiton take out the cd and re-install


Worked great for me, hope it helps someone.

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Create a hard-drive based OS X installer
Authored by: johnsawyercjs on Mar 28, '07 09:05:59PM

That process is essentially the same as everyone describes above, with the interesting variation of being booted from the install CD itself when you image and restore that very CD. Maybe in some cases this makes the resulting volume happier.



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Create a hard-drive based OS X installer
Authored by: johnsawyercjs on Mar 30, '07 01:18:27AM

I mathOne's technique tonight, using an OS 10.4.3 installer DVD in a Quicksilver, but I couldn't get Disk Utility to copy the disk image to the destination drive--it reported "no such directory". So I just told Disk Utility to directly restore the booted OS 10.4.3 installer DVD to the destination drive, and that worked--after the restore/copy, the destination drive booted successfully. I disconnected it from the Quicksilver, put it into a Firewire enclosure, connected that to a dual G5, and installed OS 10.4.3 onto the G5 in about fifteen minutes. No more worries about scratched DVDs! Prior to this, I'd had limited success with using Disk Utility to restore/copy my OS 10.4 installer DVDs to this drive before--usually it would boot after the copy, but then fail to be a bootable drive later--so I don't know if the same problem will happen with it this time.



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