[Tutorial] Installing OSX Leopard from a Hard Drive instead of DVD

[karlcloudy]

I've noticed that some people (including me) have had trouble with installing Mac OS X onto their computers from the various DVDs available. In my case, I knew my discs were not the problem, as I'd burnt many discs, used different distributions and tried low burning speeds. I even took a disc out of a friends computer who had just installed it and it still wouldn't work. The errors I am talking about are the mysterious "The system could not verify the contents of the 'x' package. Please contact the software manufacturer for assistance" errors and "The source media you are installing from is damaged". I was plagued by plenty of these errors and I decided to try something: Copy the CD to a partition on an external hard drive and run the installer from there. This worked and I managed to get my installation up and running.

 

I will now show you how to do this for yourself. All you will need is a "Hackintosh" DVD (of course), a spare partition on an internal hard drive or external hard drive. Please note that this method is designed to counteract the errors above and may not work on other errors (such as the DVD not booting at all).

 

Step 1: Boot into your DVD. Once you see the top menu bar, goto Utilites -> Disk Utility. You will need to have already created a partition (at least the size of your DVD) for this to work. If you have not formatted it HFS+ already, do this now. You will notice that when you click on a partition, tabs like "Erase", "Partition" and "Restore" come up on the right hand side. Click the restore tab.

 

Step 2: If you cannot see your DVD drive in the left hand side list, you are screwed. Kalyway was the only one I used to actually display the DVD drive and I recommend you use Kalyway for this (if you want to install another one, you could install Kalyway first then use the resulting mac install's disc utility to copy another DVD to the partition) . If you can't see it in there, you can't use it. It may be possible to copy the contents of the CD to the Hard Drive using terminal, but thats outside the scope of this tutorial. Now you need to drag the CD drive partition to the "Source" box on the other side.

 

Step 3: Now drag the partition you created for the DVD to the "Destination" box. Please make sure you DO NOT have "Erase Destination" checked, as this will not work!!! Then press the restore button.

 

Step 4: Get the "Disk Identifier" for the partition you put the DVD contents on. You can do this by right clicking it in the left pane and clicking "Information". It will be in the form diskXsY. Write this down or memorize it, because you'll need it later...

 

Step 4: Once this process has completed, you will need to reboot your computer WITH the DVD in your drive. I know this sounds stupid, but bare with me...

 

Step 5: When the DVD boot menu comes up, press F8 and add the following to the boot options: rd=diskXsY, where diskXsY is the disk identifiier you found and press enter and pray.

 

Step 6: If this process goes well, you should be away! Unless your disk was actually corrupt, you'll probably find that it will complete without a problem. Note that it will probably work faster too.

 

As I have noted above, this procedure requires that the DVD drive is picked up properly and is displayed in Disk Utility. If you can't get this to work and you have a working Tiger or Leopard installation, you can also use the disk utility in those OSes to acheive the same task.

 

I hope someone finds this tutorial useful, as it was useful for me...

[nvanberkel]

Thanks, this worked for me!

[Espionage724]

I just installed leopard from a hard drive using someone elses tut and mixing it a tiny bit with my knowledge. You method is what I did though somewhat and confirmed working.