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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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