Bootable Snow Leopard Flash Drive

[miztrniceguy]

Maybe I am in the wrong thread then. I want to run OSx from the usb drive. I want to be able to plug the thumb drive into my wife's laptop and run OSx. I tried to get OS to run in VirtualBox on her laptop but was unsuccesful.

 

I previously had it on my desktop for my wife's occasional use. When I upgraded my desktop that install was borked, as the new hardware doesn't support IDE drives (which my previous install is on) during boot. No matter what I do, BIOS doesn't see any HDD except the SATA HDD and SSD. Windows sees them though.

 

I had thought it would be easier to install it on a thumb drive, and that is what I thought the goal here was.

 

Maybe it will be easier to take the hardware that I gutted, and put into another box with my existing hackintosh drive, recreating what I had before in a different box. I had planned to do that with the hardware minus the hackintosh drive for my kids to use anyway.

 

Thanks.

 

Edited : And yes that is the screenshot on a Macbook Air (on loan) and it has OSx Snow Leopard 10.6. which is the same as my retail disc I used for my previous Hackintosh.

[Gringo Vermelho]

Follow the link I posted back in post #21, register an account on voodooprojects so you can download the attached files there, and follow the guide. Installing Chameleon to an USB flash drive is the same as installing it to a hard drive, there is no difference. The only thing you have to pay attention to are disk identifiers, but the guide mentions that as well.

 

As long as your wife's laptop can boot from USB in the first place, then you should be good to go.

 

I don't understand the "IDE drives" thing, the Asus P8Z77-V motherboard (I assume that's the upgraded desktop you mention) does not have any Parallel ATA ports - there is no way to plug in a Parallel ATA hard drive. Either that's a SATA drive, or you're using some other motherboard that you haven't mentioned. Anyway, you'll need Lion or Mountain Lion to run OS X on that board.

 

According to your screenshot, the restored installation DVD is taking up all the space on the USB drive. Therefore there is nowhere to install OS X...the installer can't overwrite itself..

You need to restore it to a separate partition of the smallest possible size....unless of course you are planning to install OS X on a second USB drive.

Also, you can't just restore the whole install DVD, that won't work. There are separate guides on how to do it properly. Again, it makes no difference if you're restoring to a hard drive partition or a partition on a USB flash drive, so take your pick among the available guides. They're all more or less identical.

[miztrniceguy]

I was using a PCIe card to run my 2 PATA drives in my old setup which was an Intel board. One had XP the other had OSx. With new Asus, I had the PCIe card installed and wanted to be able to boot to XP on demand. But the BIOS won't see the drive on a PCIe card, or if I connect drive to usb adapter and plug directly to usb ports either.

 

I did not even try to boot hackintosh drive in thet setup either, since it is on a PATA drive.

 

I will think about this more. Might be easier just to reinstall everything to my  other box, as the main hardware is intact. I basically completely gutted my box for the upgrade. Thanks again for the help.

[miztrniceguy]

Ok, so as I thought about things the past few days, I decided to take my hardware that I gutted, that was previously used as my XP/Hackintosh setup and put it in another case and hook it all back up.  It is all the same: Intel DG35EC Socket 775 mobo, E8400 Core2 Duo 3.0 Ghz cpu and 4 GB Corsair PC6400 DDR2 ram moved intact, same power supply, on board video and sound, same WD 160GB PATA HDD for XP as Master and same WD 160GB PATA HDD as slave, Same LG super multi PATA cd/dvd drive connected to a VIA 6421 eSATA controller in PCIe slot same as before. Truly the only difference is the case itself with usb ports and sound ports on the front.

 

 

This was a working Hackintosh setup, where all I had to do was hit F10 during boot to choose the boot drive and select the drive with OSx. Otherwise it would boot straight to XP.

 

I had thought it would be simple since it is all the same hardware put back together in a different case.

 

However when I select the OSx drive at boot, I get the screen with the black screen with Apple logo then it moves to gray screen with a dark gray apple and has a spinning circle. eventually a no sign (circle slash). I don't know if the whole install is borked and if I need to start over, or what. If I need to start a new thread I will be happy to do so.

[Gringo Vermelho]

If you boot with -v you'll see it halting on "Still waiting for root device".

 

Make sure that the hard drive is plugged into the same port as it was when OS X was working, and that your BIOS settings are the same as they were.

 

If it's on a PATA drive, plug the drive in at the end of the cable, jumper it as master (don't use cable select) unplug the slave drive and see if it will boot.

 

Either way you should always boot with -v when you're troubleshooting so that you can see what's happening during boot. A gray screen with an apple doesn't tell you much.

[miztrniceguy]

Yup,, that was the message, even after I disconnected the other drive and made this master. I took a picture oh boot screen. not sure if readable.

 

Originally it was slave.

 

This was originally set up with T******x86 instructions and and i boot cd I made.

[miztrniceguy]

Any suggestions? I don't Really know enough about macs to interpret the issue.