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Move USB OSX to internal HD [** SOLVED **]


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Hi all,

 

I plan to move my Leopard install from the USB drive (fully working) to a new internal HD. At the moment I run LinuxMint from the HD on a Dell 1525 & when need to boot from the USB for my 'mac' experience :D - I've now decided to get a larger HD & if possible clone both the current USB & HD OS'es to it.

 

Now I've done a little research but to be honest with you I'm finding conflicting views & ideas on how to go about this (super duper this & carbon copy that)

 

What I would like is to be able to split the new HD into 2 partitions with the option of choosing which OS to boot from & was thinking that maybe I should first clone the Linux HD to a backup (which should be fine) though it's the OSX i'm not quite sure of?

If that could be copied then I would imagine I need to restore the Linux to the first partition then the OSX to the second then boot from a Linux cd & restore the MBR then alter the menu.lst & add the OSX details?

 

Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated :(

 

TIA

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Here is what I did when moving from an external USB drive:

 

1. First I installed Linux and did all the partitioning of my internal drive there.

2. Then I booted to OSX and used Disk Utility to HFS format the empty partition (my target for OSX) and "Restore" the USB drive to that empty partition on the internal drive.

3. Then I used dd to put the Chameleon boot1h header on the new OSX partition and copied the Chameleon "boot" file to the new OSX partition root. I don't think either of these steps is necessary if you boot using GRUB (see the next step), I just did it because I wasn't sure if I was going to use Chameleon or GRUB as my primary boot menu.

4. Then I went back to Linux and put the Chameleon "boot" file in my Linux /boot area. Edited the GRUB menu to add an entry to load that boot file. Just make a normal entry with the "kernel" set to the Chameleon "boot" image.

 

From the GRUB menu I can select OS X option which in turn boots the Chameleon "boot" file which then lets me select the OSX partition to boot. I haven't figured out how to get Chameleon to read its configuration options from com.apple.Boot.plist with this setup since the Chameleon bootloader is not loaded from the OSX partition where it normally would get the options but I haven't really looked into it since I mostly only use OS X in VMware from Linux.

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Hmm, I just figured out my GRUB + Chameleon boot problem. It turns out my com.apple.Boot.plist was corrupted and it just was not reading it. I kept getting "Errors encountered while starting the computer" from Chameleon and I could never figure it out. Turns out it was printing a parsing error for the Boot.plist right after the GRUB selection but it was displayed so fast that I never saw it until just now I happened to catch a glimspe at just the right moment.

 

So booting with GRUB like I describe above works fine.

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Nice one, well I'll give that a try then.

 

A few things I hope you can clarify

 

1. what 'dd' command did you run

2. Exactly where is the 'Chameleon "boot" file' & any chance of posting your GRUB entry

3. I think your right that I probably won't need to copy the Chameleon "boot" file?

 

Cheers for the feed back - it all sounds quite 'doable'

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Nice one, well I'll give that a try then.

 

A few things I hope you can clarify

 

1. what 'dd' command did you run

2. Exactly where is the 'Chameleon "boot" file' & any chance of posting your GRUB entry

3. I think your right that I probably won't need to copy the Chameleon "boot" file?

 

Cheers for the feed back - it all sounds quite 'doable'

 

I don't think you need to worry about the "dd" stuff if you're using GRUB. I would skip that unless there is a problem. You will need to copy the Chameleon boot file though (see below).

 

The "boot" file is in the Chameleon tar.gz (don't use the Chameleon installer pkg). Just extract that and look in the "i386" directory. I copied/renamed it "/boot/chameleon" on my Linux drive. Then I made a GRUB entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst:

	 title   Apple OS X 10.5 Leopard
 kernel   (hd0,0)/boot/chameleon

 

Change the (hd0,0) to your Linux partition. You can do all this before even doing your OS X install (or Restore in this case).

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Well today was the D-day ... & all was as you explained (a big thank you ;) ) the only thing I changed was in the menu.1st

	   title	   Apple OS X 10.6 Leopard
   root		(hd0,0)
   kernel	  /boot/chameleon/boot

I then finally realised that you meant rename the 'boot' file to 'chameleon' doh! & while I was in Linux I copied the 'boot' file from the root of the OSX which worked fine (after downloading a few others which didn't work)

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