[Guide] Installing Snow Leopard without GUID tab

[chessperso]

Hi everybody,

 

Excuse my poor English , 'cause I'm French.

 

I don't know where I'm supposed to post this topic, so I'm posting it in both OsX86 Snow Leopard Installation and Tutorials forums.

 

This is not a real Guide, since what follows may be trivial for many of you.

This is more like a testimony for those who thought a GUID partition was necessary to install SL.

 

A lot of people is having trouble installing snow leopard on a hard drive which is already formatted MBR, and with a Windows tab on it.

 

The most evident solution consist in cloning/saving the Windows tab, reformatting the hard drive with GUID, install Snow Leopard, and restore the Windows tab.

 

I think this solution is a bit heavy.

 

This is what I did, after long hours and many fruitless attempts (you will need a blank USB drive) :

 

It seems that Snow Leopard won't install on a MBR formated drive, but it can boot on it if it is already installed.

I even installed updates (10.6.2) and it worked.

 

- In Windows or somewhere else make a big enough partition to install Snow Leopard on it.

 

- Boot your PC on Snow Leopard Installation (the way you want)

 

- Format HFS+ the partition that will contain Snow Leopard. (you can do this later if you prefer)

 

- Plug-in your USB blank drive and format it HFS+ GUID (using the options menu) in Disk Utility

 

- Install Snow Leopard on the USB GUID drive.

 

- When it's done, reboot Snow Leopard Installation drive

 

- In Disk Utility, click on restore, right-click on your USB drive and select chose as source, right-click on your new formatted tab and select chose as destination.

 

- Click on restore.

 

- Reboot with a chameleon/EFI/whatever you want OSX compatible bootloader USB key (you can install it later on the hard drive) and select your new Snow Leopard MBR drive.

 

- It should work...

 

It may be evident for some of you, but I've ben spending a long time looking for a way to install Snow Leopard on my Windows drive without having to reformat it.