Yamaha Home Theater
How to Clone the Tiger Installer DVD to a FireWire Drive
[Published Thursday, July 5th]
It sometimes happens that, in an extreme situation, it is necessary to reinstall the system. We have, indeed, explained in a recent tutorial that this is not difficult or time-consuming, and that it can be an easy and reliable way to restore the system to a known, clean state without losing any data.
However, the technique we advised in that tutorial does have one step that can be slightly troublesome: "Locate and start up from your system installer disk." The assumption here is that you've got something like a Tiger installer DVD. But what if your optical drive is on the blink, and won't read the DVD? What if the DVD gets lost, or scratched? Also, starting up from the installer DVD takes a long time, which is stressful and frustrating when your computer is hosed and you want to get it up and running again.
What this tutorial suggests is that you clone the installer DVD to a partition of an external FireWire drive. The resulting clone will exactly reproduce the installer DVD, so you won't need the DVD as an installer.
Note: The technique described here applies only to the full Tiger installer DVD. That means it is useful only for a PowerPC Mac, because there is no single stand-alone Tiger installer DVD for an Intel machine. Also, it does not apply to the software restore disks that came with your computer, nor does it apply to any system version that comes on multiple disks (meaning Panther or earlier, which came on 3 CDs).
Warning: This tutorial involves using Disk Utility. Think carefully before pressing any crucial buttons! If you select the wrong drive and repartition it, or if you select the wrong partition and restore to it, you can lose important data.
Attach (to your PPC Mac), mount, and prepare your external FireWire drive. You are going to want a small partition (10GB, let's say) that will contain nothing but the installer clone. You might also like to have a second small partition (10GB) onto which you will install a clean system from the installer later on. Use Disk Utility to repartition the external drive. Remember, this will delete everything on the drive, so copy any important data off the drive first.
Insert the Tiger Installer DVD into your PPC Mac and make a disk image of it. Here's how. (In theory you could skip this step and combine it with Step 3, but I like to proceed carefully and safely.) In Disk Utility, find the listing for the DVD in the left-hand column. Notice that it appears as two volumes, arranged hierarchically. What you want to make an image of is the inner (lower) volume, called "Mac OS X Install DVD". Select it and press New Image. Change the Image Format to DVD/CD Master. Give the image a convenient, meaningful name, such as TigerInstaller. Save it to your Desktop. Wait until the DVD has been copied to the image file. Then eject the DVD.
Now we're going to copy the image to the FireWire drive. You'll see that it is listed in the left-hand column of Disk Utility. Select it and press Open. The disk image is now mounted. Again, you'll see it listed in the left-hand column as two volumes, arranged hierarchically. What you want to clone is the inner (lower) volume, called "Mac OS X Install DVD". Switch to the Restore pane. You'll see two fields: Source and Destination. Drag the listing for "Mac OS X Install DVD" from the left-hand column into Source. Drag the listing for the small partition on your external FireWire drive from the left-hand column into Destination. Check both checkboxes (Erase Destination and Skip Checksum) and press Restore. Wait until the image has been copied to the FireDrive drive. You will now have two "Mac OS X Install DVD" listings in the left-hand column: one is on your FireWire drive (in the upper area of the listings), the other belongs to the disk image file (in the lower area of the listings). You can now unmount the one belonging to the disk image file.
That's all there is to it. Your external FireWire drive now contains a "Mac OS X Install DVD" partition. If you restart your computer and boot into that partition, the installer program will automatically run, exactly as it would do if you had booted from the physical DVD. You can then install (or reinstall) Tiger, exactly as you would from the physical DVD. If, as advised above, you made a second small partition on your external FireWire drive, a good idea might be to start up from the "Mac OS X Install DVD" partition now, and install Tiger onto that second external drive partition. That way, you've got two good things on this FireWire drive: a Tiger installer, and a clean copy of Tiger, with a working Finder and so forth, from which you can boot up in an emergency.
Resources
No. You can also burn the image to a DVD as a backup without violating any agreements.
No. If you going to do this usually is in a emergency aways since I had do to this several times for some PowerBooks that died with a bad DVD/CD drive. This was actually recommended by a Apple tech several years ago when I had a PowerBook TiBook that had it's hard drive dying and I couldn't boot from the CD drive. I booted to the external OS hard drive and attached another hard drive to copy to the contents of the old hard drive before I could send in the PowerBook in for Apple to replace both hard drive and CD drive.
Apple allows to make copies for backup or emergencies.
Not possible unless you know how to deconstruct the various packages and put them back together. Remember, this is an installer, not an OS image. However, you could include the requisite COMBO and other updaters (iTunes, QuickTime, etc.) and run them separately after using the Mac OS X installer.
I'm no lawyer and you'll probably get a different opinion from each one you ask. But I think ( but not too often! ) that this is just another method of protecting the disk for your own future use. And many developers allow that to be done. It's certainly less likely that you would take/use the external drive to install on a Mac of another owner. If you're going to start doing that, a DVD would be much less expensive and convenient! ;-P Not to mention a clearly illegal action.
And since the external seems a perfect place to store as many of the Upgrade images as you'd want. At least the latest of which could be on that same partition.
I'm just not sure I see this method as any better than a clone of your current system except that you'd have the clean starting point. :-)
That's the point. Doing an E&I or A&I, using the FWHD, which is much faster than using the optical media device.
Can you help me to understand why PPC is specified? I can boot my Intel iMac from my firewire drive. Is there something I'm missing?
The tutorial is talking about a retail, stand alone, Tiger installer DVD, NOT the restore disks that come with a new computer. There is NO such animal available for the Intel based machines. If you were to walk into an Apple Store and purchase the retail Tiger box it WOULD NOT BOOT on an Intel based machine. Since all Intel machines started out with Tiger in the first place there never was a retail version of Tiger produced for the Intel based machines. Leopard, on the other hand will most likely have a universal installer DVD or separate PPC and Intel versions.
That was informative and EMPHATICALLY clear. heh
Thanks so much. :)
I can't remember that last time I had to reinstall the system from scratch. I just clone now because it is much faster. Just remember to deactivate Adobe CS2. This also works with all Intel macs, except the ones that come with the current OS version preinstalled (i.e 10.4.10)
sudo asr -source /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ Disk/ -target /Volumes/your\ firewire\ partition/
press return once and authenticate and it clones the contents to the partition on your firewire drive. In using this method though you lose the bless information so you then complete the task by using this:
sudo bless --folder /Volumes/your\ firewire\ partition/System/Library/CoreServices
press return once and authenticate and your done. You can check that the partition is bootable by simply viewing its availability in Startup Disk in System Preferences. If it shows in there then you know the bless command worked.
Tip: If you use the above then you MUST rename the partition on your firewire drive so that it is identical to the name of the Install DVD.
I have used the above with developer seeds of Leopard to make re-installs happen quicker. You tend to do a lot of that;-)
Switch to the Restore pane. You'll see two fields: Source and Destination. Drag the listing for "Mac OS X Install DVD" from the left-hand column into Source. Drag the listing for the small partition on your external FireWire drive from the left-hand column into Destination.
I have NEVER been able to get the restore feature to work, and you have just given me the clue I needed as to why. I never thought of dragging the drives name from the left-hand edge of Disk Utility's window. I have been dragging the drives in from the desktop. What is even more confusing is that this WORKS in the source field, but never works in the destination field!
I travel alot and the the media disk gets scratched and damaged so that is why only keep the backup with me and the originals at so if the backup is damaged I can burn a new one from the original. Security people are NOT gentle to my stuff when I get the "thorough" inspection of my computer gear.
Although there may be no retail DVD of Tiger for Intel, I suspect that the same "disc image on an external drive" technique would work with a disc image of the Intel install DVD. It sounds as if the real issue isn't retail vs. OEM; it's bootable vs. non-bootable. Assuming you can boot from your original Intel install DVD, I can't see why the same process shouldn't apply to a disc image made from that DVD.
Personally, I've been making disc images of original install CD/DVDs for years for my clients, just on the assumption that there would come a time when they'd lose or trash their original discs, and need a clean copy.
Most of the discs since the late-Panther days (say, around 10.3.5) have been on dual-layer DVDs. If your Intel box doesn't already have a dual-layer SuperDrive, you can pick up a late-model Pioneer (DVR-110/111) for about $30, slap it in a FireWire box, get some (admittedly pricy) dual-layer media and burn your copy that way.
You could also clone it to a firewire flash drive (AFAIK Kangaru is the only company that makes these) or if you have an intel Mac, USB flash drive. That would probably pass security undamaged and would be bootable.
Found a fix. I re-applied the 10.4.10 Combo updater while booted from the internal drive. Seemed to work, so when I booted from the external partition, it took a little longer but came up. Guess it didn't like the "double boot" when booted from the external.
Anyway, now I have a portable drive with utilities.
- by jimdoc July 6, 2007 3:45 PM PDT
- "Note: The technique described here applies only to the full Tiger installer DVD. That means it is useful only for a PowerPC Mac, because there is no single stand-alone Tiger installer DVD for an Intel machine."
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
Showing 1 of 2 pages (24 Comments)I ran across this description a couple of weeks ago, and - not knowing it couldn't be done with an Intel machine - went ahead and did it with an Intel machine, using a 10.4.5 Intel DVD set.
1. If I boot from the "Install disk" partition to install the OS on another drive, the install disk partition is only recognized as Install Disk 1, even though all the content of Install Disk 2 is there on the partition as well. If I request installation of anything that requires Disk 2, I still need the actual Disk 2.
2. I can, indeed, boot and install from this partition.
3. I have another partition on the drive onto which I installed a basic system, using the "Install Disk" partition to do so, which I then upgraded to 10.4.10, and all the other intermediate updates. I can boot from this one, also.