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Bootable USB OS X Installer (Retail 10.5.4 Disc)


cmmcnamara
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Hi, I'm new here and really haven't accomplished much in the way of my Hackintosh (still scratching my head on getting my Windows 7/OS X/Ubuntu setup going on one HDD with GUID...) but I found out how to do something tonight that is really simple but may be appreciated.

 

In the midst of all of these OS installs and reinstalls to get the partitions going properly I have put all of the OS installers on USB flash drives. Its initial copies are slow but the reads are insanely fast. My goal here was to take my dual layer retail 10.5.4 disc and make a bootable usb installer that booted from the USB stick only, not using combinations such as Boot 132 CD +select USB stick as HDD. I followed a few guides which resulted in a OS X 10.5.4 retail image on the stick but no boot abilities. So I did a little brainstorming and in a nutshell it is modeled after the EFI based booting method using Chameleon 2.0. Note I was using a 16.0GB stick and total size I believe was about 7.4 GB so a 8.0GB stick is the minimum.

 

I basically merged these two guides together:

 

Chameleon 2.0 Install Guide

 

OS X Disc Imaging

 

So given those sources, these were my steps:

 

Make the USB Stick Bootable with Chameleon 2.0

 

1) Open Disk Utility and select your disk from the left pane.

 

2) Click the partition tab and set the number of partitions to 2. Make the first one small, it doesn't need to be large (I made mine 400Mb) and name it EFIUSB or something similar. I named the second partition after the Mac OS X DVD. Make sure both are in Mac OS Journaled file systems.

 

3) Open the terminal and log in as root with sudo -s. Then use diskutil list to determine which drive is your USB drive.

 

4) Format the EFI partition of the USB drive with diskutil eraseVolume "HFS+" "EFIUSB" /dev/diskXs1 replacing X with the USB drive #.

 

5)Download Chameleon 2.0 RC1 from the Chameleon website and then cd to its i386 subdirectory in terminal.

 

6) Once in the Chameleon directory issue these commands (taken directly from the first source I listed):

 

/fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdiskX (where X is your disk – loads the stage 0 bootloader)

 

dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdiskXs1 (where X is your disk – loads the stage 1 bootloader)

 

cp boot /Volumes/EFIUSB (copies the Chameleon ‘boot’ file over to your usb)

 

mkdir /Volumes/EFIUSB/Extra (makes the Extra directory on the USB stick)

 

7) You can close the terminal now and just do the rest in Finder.

 

8) From the root Chameleon folder (the one you downloaded) copy the contents of the "Optional Extras" directory to the Extra directory on your flash drive (EFIUSB partition) (should contain smbios.plist, Extensions folder, and Themes folder.)

 

9) Download the Boot-132 CD image and load it. From that image load the initrd.img contained in it and browse the initrd.img.

 

10) Copy the contents of the Extra\Extensions folder in initrd.img to your Chameleon Extra\Extensions directory. Mine had the following kexts:

 

ACPIPS2Nub.kext

IntelCPUPMDisabler.kext

dsmos.kext

ApplePS2Controller.kext

SMBIOSEnabler.kext

 

11) Check your EFIUSB directories. Mine go as follows:

 

EFIUSB

|Boot

|Extra

|Extensions

| |ACPIPS2Nub.kext

| |IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext

| |AHCIPortInjector.kext

| |IntelCPUPMDisabler.kext

| |ATAPortInjector.kext

| |SMBIOSEnabler.kext

| |ApplePS2Controller.kext

| |dsmos.kext

|smbios.plist

|Themes

 

Copy the Install DVD to USB

 

12) Open Disk Utility and place your Mac OS X Install DVD in your DVD drive or mount your image that you have.

 

13) Select your other, large partition on the USB drive and select Restore tab.

 

14) Drag the OS X Install DVD image/DVD into the source field. Drag the large USB paritition to the destination field. Check "Erase Destination"

 

15) Restore the image to the partition. This took me 15 minutes on my laptop from the DL DVD.

 

TEST IT!

 

Now reboot your computer and tell your BIOS to boot from USB. You should load up into Chameleon with 2 partitions two choose from (IF ON A CLEAN DISK). Choose the one that matches your name for the install DVD restore partition and in a few seconds you should be booted into the Mac OS X install environment.

 

Good luck I hope it works as well for you as it did for me!

 

The cool thing about this method is it enables multi-installer booting from USB. Say you have a 16GB or 32GB USB stick, you could have Chameleon load many different OS installs (granted Windows installs would be a bit trickier, but Linux and OS X are good to go!) from one USB. Imagine never having to open that CD drive for a OS boot disk or waiting long periods of time for installs (especially with high-performance USB drives like OCZ's Rally Extremes).

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thanks for your guide

 

Can you explain #10 again?

"10) Copy the contents of the Extra\Extensions folder in initrd.img to your Chameleon Extra\Extensions directory." seems puzzling --- initrd.img does not have a folder, it is a file.

What exactly was you meant to say? Thanks!

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