Install from Flash?

[canadrian]

I'm new to the whole hackintosh thing. In the past, on my real Mac, I have restored OS X install DVDs to my USB flash drive so I could add other apps (iDefrag, iPartition, etc.). It boots fine, and I can run diags or install from it. However, now that I am trying to install Leopard to my AMD box, I have a new reason to use the flash drive: The tower has 9 drive bays with 9 hard drives. No optical drive installed or available. But I can't seem to figure out how to take Zephyr's AMD iso and blat it onto the pen drive.

 

Is this even possible for non-mac machines? Am I SOL?

[BladeRunner]

I have done something close to what I think you want to do. In my case, I used an external usb hard drive. I had a running version of osx86 on the system but wanted to upgrade to leopard and get as close to retail as possible.

 

I used disk utility to format the usb hard drive to a GPT partition format. Then restored a dmg image of the retail leopard install disk to the usb drive. The next step was to install the pc_efi_v8 boot loader to the usb disk. Locate info about pc_evi_v8 on http://netkas.org/

 

Now, the usb osx install disk would start to boot. What is needed next depends on your hardware configuration. With an intel core2xxx system you can use the existing mach_kernel. With other systems you will need to replace the kernel with one of the patched darwin kernels. You will need to add the dsmos.kext to /System/Library/Extensions on the osx install disk and you may also need to replace other kexts to get the ps/2 type keyboard/mouse recognized.

 

What I did was check the some of the guides found in the forum and then replace a few kext and try to boot the usb install drive. Once that disk will boot you can install OS X on your pc hard drive. Remember, you will need to make the same set of adjustments to your new osx install as you did to the external install disk.

 

What I did to make that post install patch easier was to make a directory on the external install drive and place all the replacement kexts there along with a shell script that would copy them to the new osx install on the pc hard drive. It is also wise to use use a terminal session and make a full copy of the Extensions folder - just in case.

 

Hope this makes sense - good luck.