Native Install Two Bootable Drives and All HDD Space

[WalterDirt]

Well I figured I would document my experience. It may or may not help someone, and these forums helped me out so much I figured it was the least I could do.

 

The Goal: Get two working bootable physical drives for use in two different systems.

The Requirement: No wasted space, OSX needs to see all 120GB.

The Tools: 1 Mac Mini, 1 External USB HDD Enclosure, 2 Physical Hard drives, Darwin Bootable CD for x86, deadmoo's image

 

The Method: Okay so here's what I did to make it all work.

 

- Load up 120GB (size irrelevant but it's what I did so I'm going to mention such things) into External USB hard drive enclosure and connect to already working Mac OSX computer.

 

- Using disk utility I formatted the drive in Journaled HFS (no partitions, one big drive).

 

- dd the deadmoo image to the fresh USB hard drive. (the mini was slow)

 

- After dd completed I disconnected the USB drive, stuck it into the main PC system. Booted up into safe mode using -x at boot prompt. Removed the ATI extensions from /System/Library/Extensions so that normal boot could be accomplished, and that AppleTPM do hickey as well.

 

- Reboot, normal boot this time around (no -x). Once booted installed the SSE2 patches. Reboot and check all works fine.

 

- Shutdown. Remove HDD from system. Insert the second physical drive into the system.

 

- Install Darwin for x86 on second physical drive. *The reason I did this was because I needed a proper boot sector* Used entire drive during Darwin install. Reboot, and just double check that the boot sector works and tries to load Darwin.

 

- Remove second physical drive. Insert first physical drive (the one with deadmoo's image on it from the previous steps). Put the second physical drive (the one with Darwin on it) into the USB HDD enclosure.

 

- Boot deadmoo's image. Plug-in USB HDD Enclosure.

 

- Open Disk Utility. Select the USB Enclosure. Click "Restore". Source=deadmoos image and Destination=USB Enclsoure.

 

- DO NOT CHECKMARK "Erase Destination". That will delete the boot sector we just put there, so don't do it. Click "restore" and wait a bit.

 

- After the restore is done. Disconnect the USB Drive. Shutdown the system.

 

- Remove the deadmoo's or first physical drive from the system. Put the drive from the USB HDD enclosure into the system so you can boot from it.

 

- Boot into safe mode, and repair permissions on the drive. reboot.

 

- You now have a deadmoo version of OSX that doesn't have the 6GB limit. Whatever the size of your drive was, you have access to it.

 

- Extra steps to get more bootable drives: Basically you repeat the last few steps as many times as you like and each time you have a bootable full drive OSX x86 version. Install Darwin for the boot sector. And then restore from a working copy to a USB Drive, repair, and you're done.

 

I got all this info from this awesome site and the forums. I'm just hoping someone else might benefit from it in case they get stuck like I did.

 

 

*Notes:

 

I had no luck getting Windows to create an HFS partition. Yes I used the id=af in diskpart and finally gave up after far too many attempts. That's why I used my Mac Mini to dd the deadmoo image.

 

Good luck and thanks for all the great help; now my PC running OSX is so fast it melts faces!

[wolfcry1]

WalterDirt,

thanks for this write-up. I was having a problem getting the second drive to boot when I read this and learned to NOT check the erase destination during restore.

 

Edit: just tried this method twice and I get an error just as the restore is finishing. I get a missing file or directory error. Any suggestions?

[WalterDirt]

WalterDirt,

thanks for this write-up. I was having a problem getting the second drive to boot when I read this and learned to NOT check the erase destination during restore.

 

Edit: just tried this method twice and I get an error just as the restore is finishing. I get a missing file or directory error. Any suggestions?

 

Try running a fix permissions on your drive first. Then attempt the restore. Also, maybe try the restore in safe mode. I haven't tried it that way but it might work.

 

Actually, now that I think of it, I might of had the same issue but ignoring the message I attempted to boot anyways and it worked. No sure it's been a while. I've done this several times now, I managed to hose up my OSX a few times messing around with the ATI files. This whole method really helps in restoring the OS just as I saved it on another drive.