Making SL USB without a Mac

[RoadRiverRail]

Hello all!

 

So, I finally took the plunge and followed the Lifehacker guides for building a Hackint0sh. It's worked like a charm and appears to be stable, but it's not like I've really put it through its paces yet.

 

The one thing in the guides that really struck me is that you need a Mac to make a Hackint0sh install USB stick. Blessedly, I live in the Bay Area where you can throw a rock and hit six Mac owners, so finding a friend with a Mac was easy, but for fun, I spent the night before trying to come up with a way to do it without a Mac. It seems that most of the hard work can be done at a terminal and that there's an equivalent Linux command for most of it. Linux can do the GUID partition table, format in HFS+, dd onto the boot sector, etc.

 

The missing part appears to be a way to properly copy the Snow Leopard disc to the USB stick. The disc mounts itself as ISO9660 and appears to contain Windows utilities, but OSX clearly knows what to do with the disk. Thinking, somewhat foolishly, that I could just use dd to image the disc to the HFS+ partition on the USB stick, I got a USB stick...that also appeared as an ISO9660 image with Windows utilities. On a lark, I tried to inspect the SL DVD with parted to see if there were extra partitions, and parted freaked out at me over the disc's label being non-standard.

 

The data is in there, and I'm guessing the important stuff is in there in an HFS+ file system and that there's some trick going on in the partition table or disc volume that causes OSX to see the HFS+ file system and other OSes to see the ISO9660 file system.

 

So, perhaps someone out there might be able to point me to a resource explaining the magic here? If I understood what I was looking for on the disc, I could try to code a Linux utility to do the work that DiskUtility is doing now, and that would remove the requirement to use a Mac to make the USB stick.

 

Just a thought.