making a working retail hackintosh installation backup

[lurscher]

ok, after you spent countless hours customizing stuff to get your installation working, is not a bad idea to keep a backup of everything needed to reproduce the installation. Is really something straightforward to do (at least with the retail + efi boot approach) and i thought to comment my experience with it:

 

step 1: backup root partition

approach A: clone partition (tested)

1) open disk utility, click restore tab

2) select your root partition and drag it into source

3) select the target partition you will use to clone (the one i tried was formatted on Mac OS Journaled, on a GPT disc)

4) go ahead with the backup

 

approach B: backup partition to a dmg image (untested)

1) Open disk utility, create new image

2) make the image to have the right size to fit your root contents

3) do the same from approach A, step 1, but now choose the image you created as target partition

 

step 2: backup the EFI partition

0) sudo -s (always as root)

1) mkdir /Volumes/myEFI

2) mount_hfs /dev/diskXs1 /Volumes/myEFI (needless to say, diskXs1 is your actual efi partition right?)

3) cp -R /Volumes/myEFI/ /my/backupEFI/folder/

4) I installed the EFI following this guide: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=127330

so i also choose to keep the boot0 and boot1h bootloaders close to that folder, so you can reformat with them when needed!

 

DONE! easy right?

 

Now lets review the restore process:

0) sudo -s (always as root)

1) restore your root partition. if you followed approach A you don't need to do anything because your backup is already there. Not sure how to do this on the single-user mode terminal if you only have the .dmg image (suggestions?) anyways, whatever thing you do, write down the UUID of this restored partition (unless you are one of those that will have rd=/dev/diskXsY on their com.apple.Boot.plist kernel flag. in this case, you deserve to install everything from scratch anyways )

2) basically you will do the same steps as you did to setup the EFI partition, but instead of copying files up and down on the EFI, just need to copy the files from your backup folder!

./fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdiskX

dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdiskXs1

./fdisk -e /dev/rdiskX ( f 1 <enter> to make efi partition active, w y < enter> to commit changes, q <enter > to quit )

mkdir /Volumes/RestoredEFI

mount_hfs /dev/diskXs1 /Volumes/RestoredEFI

cp -r /my/backupEFI/folder/* /Volumes/RestoredEFI/

vi /Volumes/RestoredEFI/com.apple.Boot.plist ( change your boot-uuid flag (lets hope you used that right?!) with whatever new uuid is the partition you restored on step 1

DONE!, now just boot on diskX and you'll boot on your restored partition

[LaLo-CuRa]

2) mount_hfs /dev/diskXs1 /Volumes/myEFI

 

I get "mount_hfs: invalid argument" message.