HOWTO: Install and Boot OS X 10.4 On a Flash Drive
Remember when it was first revealed the Windows XP could be installed and booted off of a USB flash drive? Well, great for Windows users. What about Mac users? We were left out in the cold. If one were to search hard enough in the vast Web index that is Google, one could find just the snippets of how to boot a system from a USB drive, how to set a drive as bootable, yadda yadda yadda. Nothing guiding the way to creating a bootable installation of Mac OS X on a flash drive. I’m here to help.
Before I begin, let me say that I have been a Mac user for only two years. I made the switch, and I’ve learned enough about OS X in that time to let me do this. So, without any more small-talk, let’s get into it!
Before You Begin
You will need a 1GB or larger flash drive. It is impossible to install OS X on anything smaller. After testing this procedure multiple times, the largest free space I had after booting up was 11.6MB.
You will also need the original Mac OS X Install Disc(s) that came with your computer.
Preparing the Flash Drive
Start out by completely formatting your flash drive. Open up Disk Utility, select your device from the source list (mine’s a SanDisk Cruzer), and click on the Erase tab. Be sure the filesystem is Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and uncheck the option to install Mac OS 9 drivers. Space is crucial, and there will be no point in having OS 9 recognize our device if we’re trying to get it to boot into OS X. Enter a name for your drive, and click on Erase.
If you click on the new drive name, you will see that Owners are not enabled.
We have to get that changed. Open up Terminal.app, and enter the following command:
sudo /usr/sbin/vsdbutil -a /Volumes/iTote
Be sure to change the name of the volume (iTote) to correspond to the name you gave your flash drive when you formatted it.
Owners should now be enabled.
Installing the Base System
In order to extract the critical system files and install them on the flash drive, we have to use Pacifist. Insert your Mac OS X Install Disc, and open Pacifist. When Pacifist recognizes the disc, click on Open Apple Install Packages.
Select your install media and click OK.
If you are prompted to insert another disc, click Skip. The files we are looking for are on the first disc.
After the package list loads, expand EssentialSystemSoftware, then EssentialSystemSoftwareGroup. The two packages that are needed in order for OS X to boot are BaseSystem and Essentials. Select them, then click on the File menu.
Select Install Files to Other Disk…
And choose your flash drive. Click Install to begin extracting and installing. This will take a while.
Remove Unnecessary Files
If you are using a drive smaller than 2GB, you will have to remove a few files before you can continue. Open up your flash drive, and navigate to /System/Library/Fonts. Scroll to the bottom, and you will find a group of Japanese and/or Chinese fonts. Removing these will free up over 100MB. DELETED! Be sure to empty your Trash.
Copy Missing Files
Because we extracted the system with Pacifist, there are a few files that are missing off our flash drive. Open up your main hard drive which has your running copy of OS X installed. Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices. Copy SetupAssistant over to /System/Library/CoreServices on your flash drive. It might be easier to have two separate finder windows, as you will have to authenticate yourself when you copy the file.
Now we need to copy the package receipts for BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg onto our flash drive. Open your main hard drive again, and go to /Library/Receipts. Copy both BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg over to /Library/Receipts on your flash drive.
Make the Flash Drive Bootable
Now that all the required files are present, it’s time to make the system recognize the device as bootable. Open up Terminal.app once more, and enter the following command:
sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo
This command “blesses” the CoreServices folder, which makes the system recognize it as an installed operating system. Again, be sure to substitute the name of your flash drive for the volume name in the above command.
Fixing File Permissions
When the files were copied from the installer CD, they didn’t have the correct permissions to allow the system to read and write to them. Open up Disk Utility, and select your flash drive. Click on Repair Disk Permissions, and go get yourself a coffee while it runs.
Booting From the Flash Drive
If you have an Intel Mac, you should be able to set the flash drive as the Startup Disk in System Preferences. For PowerPC Mac’s, things are a bit more complicated. I’m not going to re-invent the wheel, so I’ll forward you on to this article.
In Closing
Before you start complaining that this technique does not work with Intel Mac’s, be aware that I have not tested this on an Intel Mac because, well, I don’t have one. If anyone has an Intel Mac, please let me know if you can get this working, and what differences there are in the procedure.
Trackbacks and Pingbacks
- Quicklink: Howto Install and Boot OS X on a Flash Drive | au8ust’s tech channel
- The Computer Club » Blog Archive » HOWTO: Install and Boot OS X On a Flash Drive
- one of me » the home of paul turnbull » Blog Archive » links for 2007-02-19
- Boot OS X off a flash drive - OSXUnderground.com
- LiveCD News » Archive » Install and Boot OS X On a Flash Drive at Brads Blog
- Mis choremas » Discos de arranque según se necesite
- SAINT » Blog Archive » HOWTO: Install and Boot OS X On a Flash Drive at Brads Blog
- Tuxpost Blog
- links for 2007-02-25 | KevinDonahue.com
- Apple TechCast 18 - iBlack Box-- TechCast Network
- links for 2007-02-28 » JohnTracy.com » Blog Archive
- How To Install and Boot OS X On a Flash Drive « usrbingeek’s musings
- HOWTO: Install and Boot OS X On a Flash Drive « News Coctail
- fuzzz.gaulin.ca » » Install and Boot OS X On a Flash Drive
- Mac OSX auf USB-Stick installieren - Seite 2 - Apfeltalk
- Gearfire Productivity
- RazorSharp iPods & Raw Gadgets » Blog Archive » Future Macs could be flash-based
- Boot OSX from Flash « Drew’s Blog
- Bootable OS X on 1Gb flash drive! « A Dog’s Breakfast, part II
- Daily Cup of Tech » Portable OS X Applications
- ChadKirchner.com » Blog Archive » links for 2007-04-23
- Urls Sinistras » Blog Archive » del.icio.us entre 12/06/2007 e 18/06/2007
- MAC OS X auf USB Stick installieren » Erstellen, Male, Beide, Wege, Notsystems, Install, Umweg, DasBoot, Alternativ, Eine » Amrila
- Recovering a damaged PQI flash drive | Eric Cheng’s Journal
- Install and Boot MAC OS X On a USB or Firewire Flash Drive « Things I’ve Done
- Macenstein | Review: Stuff your geek’s stockings with Mimobots
- Ben Cooper’s Weblog » Blog Archive » A Chat with Ben and Pete - Episode 10
- Well, that wasn’t too hard. « Emily’s Rant
- Urls Sinistras » del.icio.us entre 24.03.2008 e 31.03.2008
- Πριν το Πάσχα… « Unseen’d
- BradBergeron.com » A Leopard Fix Is Coming
- Maciverse » Blog Archive » Install & Boot OS X Leopard from a USB Flash Drive
- Mayhem Ensues » Blog Archive » links for 2008-09-22
- Bookmarks for September 19th through September 22nd
- things to look at (December 3rd - December 16th) | stimulant - changing things around. . .
- Christmas Holiday Geekery 2008 | ian andrew bell
- Стартиране на OSX от USB at Пектин
- Softwares for Mac users « Lovneet’s World
- Install and Boot OS X 10.4 On a Flash Drive | Think of Mac
- OS X On memory stick ?
- Bootcamp error - segmented hard drive - Mac-Forums.com
- Make a bootable tiger pen on windows - Mac-Forums.com
- Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks? « Hmmm… Spam Blog
- Tiger and eMac - iPhone, iPad, iPod Forums at TiPb.com
I found it works great on usb 1.0 (very slowly) or usb 2.0 (PCI card-about the same speed as my old G3 450mhz imac). I’m having fun finding and testing tiny apps. I want to see how complete & usable I can make this drive.
I noticed that my flash drive only shows up as a boot option if I shutdown then start up, it doesn’t show up if I simply do a restart. Later I’ll be testing if I can boot this drive on some friends PPC macs too. . . if they’ll let me.
P.S. I read somewhere else that it should work with any version of OS X , so using the same directions, I made a mini-install of Panther. It boots fine from internal HD & external FW drives, but hangs at boot using usb 1 or 2.
A mini-install of Jaguar crashes.
Cheers!
Memorex TravelDrive usb 2.0-2GB
Mirrored Drive Door G4
Dual 867 mhz
1.25 gb ram
OS 10.4.8
Hi guys,
I have a problem with my PowerPC G3. My hard drive died, and I was wandering if I can install and boot the OSx with a flash drive. Is it possible???
Please let know if it’s possible.
Having one installation for both Intel & PPC will only work if you use a retail install DVD/CD. The system-specific discs that come with the computer only have the version for that computer.
-Gary
Great idea! whats the use?
Its even easier to use the freeware utility “DasBoot” by SubRosaSoft if what’s needed is a bootable utility flash drive. It works beautifully.
http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=200&products_id=193
This is nice but at the same time it is not simple. It would be nice to have this wrapped into an installer that would do the job for us…
———-
http://www.mostofmymac.com
Remember that USB flash drives do have a limited number of times that they can be written to.
I’d be a bit concerned about the swap being on the flash drive. It’d be a much better option to have the SWAP be on a RAM disk.
” … This is nice but at the same time it is not simple. It would be nice to have this wrapped into an installer that would do the job for us ”
I’m not so sure we can make it simple enough for you, then. Put it on the list of things that go way over your head, if there’s still room.
” … Remember that USB flash drives do have a limited number of times that they can be written to.
Id be a bit concerned about the swap being on the flash drive. Itd be a much better option to have the SWAP be on a RAM disk. …”
An excellent point (applies to Windows Flash Boot and Linux Live boots as well). The critical factor would be free space, since all modern flash drives use a system where the data moves to new areas of the disk (the memory address stays the same, so the system doesn’t know the physical location has changed) so that all new data is written to the entire free space before it is rewritten to a previously used space. If he has less than 10 MB free on a 1GB drive that implies that 2GB is much preferred for long life of the flash drive.
Still, may as well wear out the 1GB unit; a 2GB unit (or whatever) will be much less $ by the time that rolls around. Let the market bring the prices down while you wear out the tools you already own.
i can’t make the drive bootable after i followed your intructions to the “t”? Why?
“sudo bless verbose folder /Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices bootinfo”
I just realized this as well. To make an intel installation you have to start with an intel native install disc. I used the disc from my CoreDuo iMac. Then you have to not only create a bootinfo file, but also an EFI file.
So your bless line looks like:
sudo bless -verbose -folder /Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices -bootinfo –bootefi
It works great!
[Its even easier to use the freeware utility DasBoot by SubRosaSoft if whats needed is a bootable utility flash drive. It works beautifully.]
That’s not for USB devices on PPC Macs according to their notes. Only FireWire devices.
Is there a way to do this without erasing the volume I have a palm lifedrive would it work the same if I made a partion on the drive for it?
I figured out to get the partion and everything going but when I tried to make it bootable through the terminal code I got this error (I’m Intel Based)
EFI found at IODeviceTree:/efi
Mount point for /Volumes/iTote/BaseSystem Folder/System/Library/CoreServices is /Volumes/iTote
Common mount point of ‘/Volumes/iTote/BaseSystem Folder/System/Library/CoreServices’ and ” is /Volumes/iTote
Can’t load /Volumes/iTote//usr/standalone/ppc/bootx.bootinfo
Could not load BootX data from /Volumes/iTote//usr/standalone/ppc/bootx.bootinfo
Could not create BootX, no X folder specified
Can’t load /Volumes/iTote//usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi
Could not load boot.efi data from /Volumes/iTote//usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi
Could not create boot.efi, no X folder specified
Got directory ID of 26944 for /Volumes/iTote/BaseSystem Folder/System/Library/CoreServices
Error while getting file ID of /Volumes/iTote/BaseSystem Folder/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi. Ignoring…
finderinfo[0] = 26944
finderinfo[1] = 0
finderinfo[2] = 0
finderinfo[3] = 0
finderinfo[5] = 26944
what is an x file?
I did it just like the instructions said and it worked fine on my macbook c2d .
using a sandisck cruzer 2gb you have separately installed safari, and other apps
boot speed sucks though but kewl project to have fun with anyways.com
My Essentials package is nearly 800 mb is this because I am installing from 10.4.6? Is there away to get everything on a 1gb drive still?
I just used a this technique successfully to boot and repair a 12″ Mac G4 Powerbook OS 10.3.9.
Added Disk Warrior 4.0 to flash drive before booting and repaired my problematic HD
I used a 2G flash drive simply because I had one.
THANKS!!!
I followed the instructions till these lines: “Booting From the Flash Drive (…) For PowerPC Macâs, things are a bit more complicated. Iâm not going to re-invent the wheel, so Iâll forward you on to this article. (…) Then, just to see what would happen, I decided to try the flash drive – without doing any additional difficult things: it works! Great!! Thank you very much Brad Bergeron!!! (I have a PowerBook G4, OS 10.4.9). On the Flash Drive (4 Gig, USB 2.0) now: OS 10.4.9 (stripped as instructed above), TechTool Pro 4.5.2 and DiskWarrior 4.0. Does anyone out there have a suggestion for other rescuing software?
I have successfully installed the Mac OS X onto my Creative Zen Vision M Mp3 player. You can set up to 16 GB as a removable disk, so you can use it as a Flash Drive. Following these instructions, I am at the point right now for repairing the disk. Will keep you updated, if it actually lets me boot off it or not. But I was unable to get the owners to work. It says sudo is not a recognized command. However I got the same issue again, for the booting part near the bottom, however this time, I left out the sudo, and it was able to find it, and say it is bootable.
So if this works, then I should be able to boot off my Mp3 player
Thanks so much Brad!
Run Monolingual then to get back some precious free space.
I used this process to install OS X Tiger onto a Powerbook G3 Lombard, along with an external USB to 2.5″ EIDE drive enclosure. Thanks, Brad! Folks can read about it at my blog.
I’ve also added a step vital to this process if you plan to make SSL connections with your new install of OS X!
=========
The first thing you should do with your new system, after going through the setup assistant, is run “Keychain First Aid” from the “Keychain Access” program. For some reason I’ve yet to diagnose, two files critical to creating SSL network connections were not copied over/created. These are:
System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors
System/Library/Keychains/X509Certificates
If Keychain First Aid complains about either of those files being corrupt or missing, you’ll have to copy them over from another Macintosh running any version of OS X from Jaguar on up.
======
Dont get it, Goes trough everything except:
when I do this part:
sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/Rescue/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo
The bless part were it gives the following error:
No mount point for /Volumes/Rescue/System/Library/CoreServices
Can’t determine mount point of ‘/Volumes/Rescue/System/Library/CoreServices’ and ”
Bit lost after that.
thanks
@Hajo – Be sure you are using two hashes before each flag. It’s hard to tell from the code above, but it’s clear in the accompanying picture.
sudo bless –-verbose –-folder “/Volumes/Rescue/System/Library/CoreServices” –-bootinfo
hey brad,
chrs for the prehaps a new tutorial should be set to allow for new findings, work arounds and visual results of each process etc… just a suggestion. i have encountered a issue with the blessed section that i can’t figure out. after typing or copying in my case;
sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo…
…i get;
OpenFirmware found at IODeviceTree:/openprom
OpenFirmware model is ” OpenFirmware 3″
Mount point for /Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices is /Volumes/JOURNAL
Common mount point of ‘/Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices’ and ” is /Volumes/JOURNAL
Removing UF_IMMUTABLE from /Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Deleting old /Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Opened dest at /Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX for writing
0x0002B000 bytes preallocated for /Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Type/creator set to tbxi/chrp for /Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Setting UF_IMMUTABLE on /Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
BootX created successfully at /Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
No boot.efi creation requested
Got directory ID of 51948 for /Volumes/JOURNAL/System/Library/CoreServices
finderinfo[0] = 51948
finderinfo[1] = 0
finderinfo[2] = 0
finderinfo[3] = 0
finderinfo[5] = 51948
i think its worked but i’m not exactly sure as there isn’t a reference. visual or otherwise. i would really like this to work for may reasons. could you advise. sorry if this was a little late i know this thread started a long time ago
regards
p
1.9 flash memory usb
iBook G4
1.4 mhz
512 ram
OS 10.4.11
right, major thanks are in order as i have managed to boot through USB externally. i still haven’t seen whether the minimal boot works from flash but i will very likely report my findings again once i have tried out that method.
ok above, in the last post, is what i got from the flash bootable method (thanks Brad) which as far as i know should work. getting it to boot was the hard part as i have a OS X machine (iBook G4 1,4mhz) ‘post’ OS9. IMPORTANT! these apparently are the only machines not accessible to start up by holding option(alt). the firmware, form what i read previously to these machines was actually open enough to accept the of most bootable disks and through USB, although it wasn’t readily known nor released by apple.
i’d lost faith a little that it could be achieved and had to clone my entire hard drive. i wasn’t getting a positive response from the long method through OF (OpenFirmware) method – http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060301112336384 (thanks CHerbold). what i had got was the “no entry” symbol, this allowed me to continue to find the answer (it meant i was getting somewhere someone didn’t want me to
). after reading through the last link i also found there had been people that had achieved booting from external via USB but hadn’t explained “how?” and, eventually lead me to the correct input to needed to boot via USB;
(“boot-device” now obsolete as “boot” all that is needed in order to set the command OF)
boot ud:3,\\:tbxi – didn’t work
boot disk0(1or2)/disk3,\\:tbxi – non successful
nor did,
boot usb1(or2)/disk:3,\\tbxi – same same, either geting no entry or a message that the directory wasn’t being read or found.
so i looked into find out exactly where everything was that need to be found. you can find that here;
- (top left-hand corner)apple>about this mac>more info
- hardware>USB…
…here is here i located where the exact position of the drive was and boot data in relation to OF. it gave me four USB port’s Buses of which to inspect. the bottom two USB were connected to the device i was look for of which i then found the disk info. that OF wanted. if you click directly on the device recognised and then scroll to the bottom you’ll find some info which look like this;
Capacity: 74.53 GB
Removable Media: Yes
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
Version: 1.00
Bus Power (mA): 500
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: JMicron
OS9 Drivers: No
Product ID: 0×2338
Serial Number: D578C9070219
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Vendor ID: 0x152d
Volumes:
boot (device name):
Capacity: 74.41 GB
Available: 23.9 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s3
Mount Point: /Volumes/boot
…it verifies where the usb is in computer’s hardware
- i.g. BSD Name: disk1 (or USB1, port closest to the back of the machine, ether and firewire port’s).
gives you the info. and also location the bootable data is held after the device’s name at the bottom
- i.e. BSD Name: disk1s3 (disk3).
i wrote this down and continue to boot machine into OF (command[apple]+O+F) and typed;
- boot usb1/disk:3,\\\\:tbxi
this was a last ditch attempt at launching via USB and wouldn’t have been found without reading the last bit tips of CHerbold’s post or Albert Siersema article – http://www.mediacaster.nl/usb_boot_imac_powerpc_g5.html. which helped me explore the locations of the actually information i wanted to locate and offer options OF command vital to boot through USB.
thanks for all the help, Brad, CHerbold and Albert. my faith is fully restored in being able to tamper with my machine as i want to temper with it and still come out smiling. i hope this is of help to somebody else.
hey,
method used was CCC to copy the drive over to the external. i also accomplished this by the ‘Brad’ tutorial on a flash memory stick (not the ‘cruzer’ as specified) but any old thing with energy supplied through the (usb) port itself will do.
if; your computer doesn’t (or isn’t meant to support this method of booting), then its generally about finding the correct path, aforementioned in the above post.
if; your using the ‘Brad’ technique you may need to copy over some preferences to the for mouse and track controls (unfortunately the housing on my iBook track pad button collapsed the other week and i have to use the silly “but very helpful” track extended controls e.g. click, double click and drag…)
summary: it is very possible, you may have to try various different commands (depending on machine and OS) to get it to work to a satisfactory end as due to the way apple markets and deploys its product this places the working of your computer back into your hands, as it should be.
good luck to all who endeavour.
Hajo -
Try “cd /” (no quotes) to take the prompt to the root of the system before attempting the sudo bless command.
Also, try this:
sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/itote/system/library/coreservices” –bootinfo –bootefi “/usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi”
Cheers,
Thiago
I have the following error:
gginocchio:~ administrator$ sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo –bootefi
OpenFirmware found at IODeviceTree:/openprom
OpenFirmware model is ” OpenFirmware 3″
Mount point for /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices is /Volumes/BootG4
Common mount point of ‘/Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices’ and ” is /Volumes/BootG4
Removing UF_IMMUTABLE from /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Deleting old /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Opened dest at /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX for writing
0x0002B000 bytes preallocated for /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Type/creator set to tbxi/chrp for /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Setting UF_IMMUTABLE on /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
BootX created successfully at /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Can’t load /Volumes/BootG4//usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi
Could not load boot.efi data from /Volumes/BootG4//usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi
Could not create boot.efi, no X folder specified
Got directory ID of 22571 for /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices
Error while getting file ID of /Volumes/BootG4/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi. Ignoring…
finderinfo[0] = 22571
finderinfo[1] = 0
finderinfo[2] = 0
finderinfo[3] = 0
finderinfo[5] = 22571
gginocchio:~ administrator$
It’d be nice to update this for Leopard, Brad. Jauncho- I believe this will only work on Intel Macs. You seem to have a G4 PPC mac which uses OpenFirmware for booting, not EFI for i386 (both are basically versions of BIOS Flash ROMs on Macs) Plus, many PPC macs are not USB bootable- You can only boot from Firewire- There is a bootable Mac utility firewire Flash disk from Micromat called Protege. $220+ I believe it was made specifically for this reason.
Fantastic i now have OS X on a flash drive, but i had to use a -bootefi at the end.
this looks awesome – but i have no idea if this means i’d be able to stick this into a PC and have it work – i assume the answer is a resounding “no” though…just curious…
I tried using my old 400 Mhz iMac as an iTunes jukebox earlier, but the whining from the original HD drove me crazy. Now it’s completely silent, thanks to your excellent guide!
About the swap space: apart from saving read/write cycles on the flash drive, isn’t is a bit silly to put the swap space on a RAM-drive? Wouldn’t that give you less free RAM and increase the need for swap space, giving you a slower system?
Just wanted to add my experience with an Intel Core 2 duo Macbook. This tutorial works wonderfully, a couple of observations: 1) I was asked a few times (may be 5) about missing files when installing with Pacifist, I just clicked skip and clearly had no effect on the installation; 2) I was also asked in Pacifist about replacing files and I replaced them all (but did not used the update option); 3) I used the –bootefi option as indicated by Cory Elsmore for the bless line and last 4) I used a 2GB Micro Center USB drive (about $15). My installation is an OS X 10.4.8.
This is worth a try and it doesn’t take such a long time. And it works very well. It doesn’t come with Safari, but Firefox came to the rescue (Opera would not work). Wireless WPA2 with an Airport Extreme does indeed work.
Good luck!
Alejandro
I forgot to add that speed is very acceptable! Now I have my very own recue USB drive with Carbon Copy Cloner on it, which works well as well.
I obtained about 230MB free space in the 2GB stick after the whole process is concluded. Not enough for executing the Apple updates, but I wasn’t intending to do them anyways. Airdisk does not seem to work though, not a biggie.
thanks for the guide. i tried it with 10.9 and my 4gb nano, but it wont fully boot. i booted it into verbose mode and its saying that Setup Assistant is crashing.
any ideas?
sorry, 10.4.9 and i have the crash log generated, but i dont really know what i should be looking for…
thanks
I found none of this was necessary at all.
Using an 8GB Sandisk ExtremeIV CF card in a Lexar firewire reader just startup from the Leopard install disk, format the CF card (you have to choose GUID partitioning or you’ll get a message telling you so)
Then you can do a straightforward install of Leopard (skipping print drivers etc.)
After deleting a few unneeded apps there’s about 1.4GB of usable disk space on the bootable CF card.
No Terminal commands or anything else needed.
@ds Again, I wrote this article over a year ago. Since then, the capacities of flash drives have gone up while the prices have dropped. Being able to install directly to a flash drive might be new with Leopard, as I have yet to try this method with Leopard.
i have one question. one of the steps is to make the USB device bootable by typing in sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo
then near the bottom you posted a link about booting from the USB device. why if i make the USB device bootable do i have to do those steps listed in the link? couldn’t i just shut down, start up and hold down the alt option key then select my device?
oh, im running a g3 ibook 800mhz
I am just wondering if you can run it on a PC. i know that they are evil and from the devil, but it is all I can get my hands on(my brother has a macbook, my sister and mother have ibooks). Anyway, I have used linux from my flash drive and it works great! I would like to be able to do the same with Mac OS X, running it on Vista Home Basic
@JRobb – No, this method will not work for running OS X on a PC, at least not to my knowledge.
I’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to create a bootable Transcend 8GB USB Flash Drive with my MBP C2D and Leopard. Everything seems to go as planned with the exception of the final sequence, where by the “repair permissions” takes almost no time at all. Disk Utility reports that the drive is bootable, but it doesn’t show up in Startup Items. I’ve followed these brilliant instructions religiously; if anyone knows whether it’s the hardware or the OS version, please let me know. I am dying to get a bootable flash drive. Thanks.
Hi-
Sorry for my ignorance. I’ve never used the Terminal before. When I type in
sudo
/usr/sbin/vsdbutil
-a /Volumes/iTote
substituting “iTote“ with the name of my drive, I get ‘no such file or directory”
Any tips on doing this in the Terminal app?
Thanks,
Richard
I am having trouble with the last Terminal command in the process: sudo bless.
I am using the “hash” marks (a double hyphen). I receive the the following error:
OpenFirmware found at IODeviceTree:/openprom
OpenFirmware model is ” OpenFirmware 3″
No mount point for /Volumes/BootFlash/System/Library/CoreServices
Can’t determine mount point of ‘/Volumes/BootFlash/System/Library/CoreServices’ and ”
Here is the command I typed in Terminal:
sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/BootFlash/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo
I have a 667MHz PPC TiBook running Mac OS X 10.4.11.
I can’t remove the fonts from the Mac OS Install disc!
Will this work for an external USB hard drive?
@Richard Kane – Make sure you type that command entirely on one line. Also, if your drive name has a space in it, you must escape the space with a backslash in the command line. For instance, if my drive was named ‘Rescue Drive,’ the command would look like this: ‘sudo /usr/sbin/vsdbutil -a /Volumes/Rescue\ Drive’
@Justin – You can’t remove fonts from the Install Disc because it’s read-only. You’re supposed to remove fonts from the flash drive you’re creating.
@BRav – I believe you should have no problem making an external USB drive to work with these instructions.
Rockin’
I just used this technique to install 10.4 on a third partition of a Wallstreet 266Mhz/192Mb/40Gb booted from an os9 helper disk with XpostFacto. Previously the installer for tiger blocked me because I have less than 256Mb, kinda pokey right now but actually boots and runs faster than the10.3.9 thats on the second partition (I ran Pacifist from 10.3).
Update to 10.4.11 and all other updates went perfectly. When all apps and files are transfered from the 10.3 drive I will just CCClone the 10.4.11 to the second partition.
The wallstreet was actually cheaper than a 4 gig USB drive and comes with its own screen.
This was not the original intention of this howto I’m sure, now if some one will just make an app so that i can with one click install leopard on my Commodore 64…..I’m waiting….
Thanks for the clear cut instructions.
Dear Brad,
Thank you very much for this post.
I attempted to make a bootable 8GB USB flash drive for my MacBook pro and followed your instructions. However, I could not find BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg in my hard drive after installing each on the flash drive.
Any suggestions?
Thank you for your time and attention to the above.
Sincerely,
William Franklin McCoy, M.D.
Doesn’t work for me (Macbook bought in may 2008) with 10.5.3.
For this step:
“Now we need to copy the package receipts for BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg onto our flash drive. Open your main hard drive again, and go to /Library/Receipts. Copy both BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg over to /Library/Receipts on your flash drive.”
I don’t have any BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg on /Library/Receipts (?!?!)
What I can do?
Same here, I can’t seem to find the BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg in /Library/Receipts
Maybe its not in Leopard OS X altogether?
Man, its too bad!
Thanks for the very helpful guide, though!
hey Brad
On the blessing stage this is what I get:
sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/Tiger/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo
No volume specified
what am I doing wrong?
Brad
Excellent guide! Can’t wait but will for the Leopard solution. Have a great summer.
regards
@al Make sure in the bless command you use double dashes “sudo bless – -verbose – - folder” etc..
Hi, i’ve done this on my macbook with leopard. I installed everything on a 4Gb A-data flash drive. besides the two packages, i also installed the additional essential package. Blessing must be done with an additional parameter “-bootefi” to get the flash drive be recognized as bootable.
However, when booting up, everything hangs, the macbook is showing the nice running wheel for ever. Has anyone experienced the same problem?
Besides , an alternative to blessing is to install everything on the flashdrive and to use cc-cloner to backup the flashdrive to a sparseimage, and put this image back on the flashdrive, with the option that the drive must be bootable after copying. Is it possible to install everything directly to a sparseimage, after which you can trim it and put it on the flash drive by cc-cloner, or do directly a selective copy by cc-cloner from the hard disk?
This doesn’t work for me at all on OSX 10.5.4 (my original disc came with my Macbook 2008). The problem is the Essential and base packages are much larger than in the screen shot they’re 1.7GB and 1.2Gb not a couple hundred megabytes, so I can’t get past that step because Pacifist says insufficient free space.
PS: I think if you were to get a drive big enough for OS X 10.5 leopard, you would have to make sure to partition that drive with the GUID partition table option under the partition area of Disk Utility, otherwise it won’t boot on an intel machine.
I keep getting “checksum for the file ____ is incorrect. The file may not have been extracted properly or may be damaged. Please take caution in using the file.” errors while Pacifist is verifying the installed Essenstials files from the Tiger 10.4 DVD on a 2 gig flash drive.
Karl, indeed. I bought a 8 Gb flash drive to do the job with leopard. But, until yet it does not work. and the nice wheel keeps running into infinity.
I was able to get my 12″G4 powerbook to boot from an USB flash drive, and hope to share some info. This was with 10.4.11.
1. Stay away from Cruzer U3 drives, the only way to come even close with these is to use the Windows un-installer to reformat the drive, AND use an old USB hub which switches the Cruzer drive into USB 1 mode. This was the only way I could boot from this drive.
2. A Sony flash drive was easy to set up with the regular instructions, and booted up in USB 2 mode.
3. If you don’t want to use Pacifist, set up a 4 gb partition on one of your drives, and do a normal OS install. After installing, delete all the apps and library items you don’t need.
Then in terminal, copy the above partition volume to the USB drive using :
sudo asr -source /Volumes/your4gbpartition – target /Volumes/yourUSBdrive -erase -noprompt
Bless the USB drive – but remember the above asr operation will rename the USB as “your4gbpartition 1″
sudo bless -folder /Volumes/your4gbpartition\ 1/System/Library/CoreServices
Finally for big drives, use the System Disk to boot up, and don’t use “sudo” in the above terminal commands. This is faster.
In leaopard the essentials.pkg and basesystem.pkg are located in “/Library/Receipts/bom/”.
Also i found i whenever i try to bless my 4GB USB Flash drive i get this error:
olis-macbook:Recovery Boot oli$ sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/Recovery\ Boot/System/Library/CoreServices/” –bootinfo –bootefi
EFI found at IODeviceTree:/efi
No mount point for /Volumes/Recovery\ Boot/System/Library/CoreServices/
Can’t determine mount point of ‘/Volumes/Recovery\ Boot/System/Library/CoreServices/’ and ”
If anyone can help me it would be much appreiciated. Thx
and i hope my tip helps some of you!!!
Sorry for the double post but i have found the solution to my problem. It goes something like this:
This solution is for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on an intel mac
I followed all the steps upto the point where you make the flash drive bootable. At this point i edited the command shown so that it worked:
sudo bless –folder /Volumes/Recovery\ Boot/System/Library/CoreServices/ –bootinfo –bootefi
**Notice i rearranged the command and removed the quotes around the directory**
Also remember as i said in my previous post that the Essentials.pkg & BaseSystem.pkg are located in “/Library/Receipts/bom/”
Thanks again and if you have any questions feel free to drop me a mail at oli.help@me.com and i will be happy to help. (As much as is in my power!)
WOW!!! Thanks this works great! I didnt use a Flash Drive but I did use my old iPod Video 30 GB! Now I have a bootable driver just in case. I use this bootable drive to defag my hd. I know macs arent supposed to get fragmented but i download a lot of large files and erase them so it does happen. I used to just partion my disk and run idefrag from the partion but, i recently install windows vista and cant re-partition the disk, this is a life saver thx!
How much work would it take to get that disk to boot on a standard laptop?
I have a IBM R51 and I have tried everything to get it to use osx but no joy, dont get me wrong I am a keen Mac user and buy all software legit.I have a 20″ white Imac with Leopard on ( rockz with 2gb ram!)and a G4 Powerbook.
I only rob microsoft!
@Adam I have no experience with getting a USB installation of OS X working on a PC. That would require much more work than it’s worth. However, I did do a quick Google search and discovered that you should be able to easily install a hacked version of OS X on your ThinkPad R51.
Thanks, Oli! For a PPC and 10.5 you’re also right: the specified
sudo bless –verbose -–folder /Volumes/DiskName/Library/CoreServices -–bootinfo
will use the wrong path; one must route first to the disk’s System folder to find CoreServices…
sudo bless -verbose -–folder Volumes/DiskName/System/Library/CoreServices -–bootinfo
—->”Having one installation for both Intel & PPC will only work if you use a retail install DVD/CD. The system-specific discs that come with the computer only have the version for that computer.
-Gary”
No, sorry it is not currently possible to create a single or even multiple volumes on a single physical storage device that is capable of booting OS X on both PPC and x86 Macs. The reason being the difference in boot methods and bootable partition map types between the two types of ROM…
PPC Macs use the OpenFirmware ROM, (once patched they can boot from USB devices)… Standard Apple OpenFirmware requires volumes to use the APT (Apple Partition Table) in order to enable the partitions residing on a volume to be bootable.
x86 Macs use the EFI ROM (Extensible Firmware Interface by intel)… EFI requires volumes to use the GPT (Globally Unique Identifier Partition Table) in order to enable the partitions residing on the a volume to be bootable.
The same goes for BIOS based x86 PCs… they use the BIOS ROM… BIOS requires storage devices to use the MBR (Master Boot Record) Partition Table in order for partitions residing on a volume to be bootable… this is why it is necessary to use an EFI emulator and MBR to run OS X on standard BIOS based PC hardware (aka hackintosh).
One device can only use one partition map type… it applies for all of the partitions residing on the device (it is separate from the file-system which resides within the partition itself).
this is why it is not possible to make a single device bootable on computers with different ROMs that use different partition maps for booting… unless someone figures out how to create a hybrid partition map for APT/GPT (if that is even possible).
Can someone tell me if its possible to use this technique to boot from an SDHC card inserted in a card-reader in the Mini-PCI-X slot in a Macbook Pro?
I would very much like to install Linux – or another copy of OSX – on the card reader in my PCI-X slot, but no matter what I try I cannot get my MacBook Pro to recognize the disk on startup as a ‘bootable’ volume. Any help with this is greatly appreciated ..
Just a thought. With the cheap price of USB drives and thumb drives would be interesting to use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable image of a running MAC on a large USB drive – strip this image down to the bare essentials, boot from it then again carbon copy clone this reduced image to a suitably sized USB stick. Would not achieve what the author did (cudos given) but 8 or 16GB memory sticks are real cheap these days.
Thank you so much Brad Bergeron! From this I found out what made my iBook G3 recognize my USB flash stick as bootable – it was the “sudo bless” command! I (with lot’s of time and frustration) managed to slim and clone my iBook’s tiger OS onto my 4GB flash stick and am testing it as I type this now. Of course I can’t expect speed from USB 1.1. What’s funny is that my PowerBook G4 does not see the flash drive in the Option-Boot menu (some call it the BIOS) but the iBook does. Can the PowerBook boot off of a USB 2.0 cardbus expansion card? I tried the whole firmware-hacking style but it didn’t work (or maybe I did something wrong). Just wondering…
Turns out that this works great! Very slow on USB 1 but you probably couldn’t live without it for recovery purposes. Thanks again for this tutorial.
There is also another way of installing 10.4 to the flashdrive without using Pacifist. Saves money too.
On the 10.4 Install disc navigate to
/System/Packages/
and install manually
- BaseSystem.pkg
- Essentials.pkg
- MigrationAssistant.pkg
In this way the receipts are automatically added to the right ‘receipts’ folder (no need to do this manually anymore) and by installing MigrationAssistant.pkg you also install the SetupAssistant that you otherwise would need to move manually.
For the rest follow the manual by Brad for blessings and otherwise.
Hope this helps,
Jan
This is great. Thanks so much! Do you think I could create a disk image and write it to a CD and have it be bootable? I am going to give it a try… (any tips?)
There is an easier way to enable owners. After enabling it on Terminal didn’t work, I right clicked on the drive, went to the ‘Permissions’ section and Authenticated, then un-checked ‘Ignore Ownership on This Drive’. Brilliant idea though. I love it.
Nice tutorial, when it comes to actually booting do you have to have a OS X operating system on the hard drive even though your booting with the flash drive?
I tried this methods with modifications mentioned above. However, when booting from USB flash drive, the Finder did not launch. I only got Menu goodies such Clock icon, and Dock at the bottom, but HD and boot disk was not shown on the upper right, nor could I access the file system. Any idea on what I missed during the install? I did chose the Essential and additional essential packages from the Leopard 10.5.6 install disc.
I just tried this and the instructions were perfect. It installed on my PowerPC G4 like a charm. One note tho’.. I did NOT follow the PPC link and mess with OpenFirmware, I instead held OPTION when booting and selected the flash drive (which thankfully showed up!). MANY THANKS!!
I found this very instructive. Nice job.
I haven’t done it, but I’m impressed with your content and style.
I found this searching for “can I install my os X on another mac in addition to my laptop”
Haven’t gotten that answered yet!
Um Brad…I have a hard question: I have a Mac Plus. I downloaded the 7.5.5 OS from Apple, dont have disks for the drive(800K) and will need to load the OS on to the 64Meg USB Flash Disk from my PC Laptop and hook it to the SCSI as though it were a HD To boot the MacPlus.
WHat do I need?
What do I do?
Thanks ahead of time.
HI Brad,
I did according to the above mentioned way, with the addition that I formatted the Transcend 4GB flash stick to the GUID partition before copying the files from the MAC OSX Leopard 1.5.4 install disk. everything went fine, the flash memory stick appeared in the start up options window , however when i booted the system holding the option key , the system started to load but the colorful wheel revolved for an eternity.. something is wrong , the question is what?
) If anybody has any experience as well info is appreciated. My system is a MAC Mini, core2duo 1.83mhz 4GB RAM Leo 1.5.6
Hi,
is it working on an external hard drive ?
@Nemrod – Mac OS X can be installed on an external HD by default as long as the drive has a large enough capacity. Otherwise, this method should allow you to get it working on a smaller drive. If you have a recent Mac, you should see the drive when you boot up holding the Option key. Otherwise, you might have to use the USB boot method referenced in the article.
Thanks
A question, i did not found the required packages int he folder /Library/Receipts
Any idea ?
The version of OS X I have requires 2.9GB of space for the two base packages. I’ll have to pick up a larger USB stick. But since prices are cheap for these, I might was well go for a 16GB stick and try to install everything.
when I typed: sudo bless –verbose –folder “/Volumes/nick/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo, it asked me for a password but then it said: “no volume specified”
p.s. my flash drive is called “nick”
@nick be sure you’re using double dashes before the verbose and folder flags, i.e. –verbose –folder
wasnt able to see drive in open firmware on powermac g4 dual 400mhz, 1gig generic usb thumbdrive mounts fine when in desktop but cant be found as startup drive, also not sure if it blessed right
ok, i’m a bit foggy on this issue. i’m wanting to install leopard onto an emac powerpc g4. my system meets all requirements that i have found regarding the task, so i’m not concerned about installation issues just yet. in the process of preparing my 8gb flash drive i can’t seem to get any options for the drive in disk utility (no MBR or otherwise) i’m using osx 10.3.9 so i’m not sure if that is the issue, and i’m fairly new to mac’s so any help at all would be greatly appreciated.
I have been looking everywhere for a way to download pacifist. mac update and version tracker included. I even tried to get older versions of it, but I simply can’t connect. My location is in California
@Jonas: I’m not sure where you are located, but the site is and has been up and steady. Try googling for a mirror, or perhaps MacUpdate or VersionTracker might have one.
I found pacifist after a long and hard search for it, but I still haven’t been able to make the usb disk be treated like an OS. Yes, I know the guild is for 10.4, but I thought 10.5 wouldn be no different. Here are the differences. BaseSystem.pkg and essentials.pkg are not in Leopard. The bless terminal part only worked when I took out the “”. all in all, It still did not work.
Everything work so good without problems…. Thank you good guide!!!!
Italian Mac
sudo bless –verbose -–folder /Volumes/macOSX2/System/Library/CoreServices -–bootinfo -–bootefi
I cannot get this bless to work. I keep getting an error message:
bless: unrecognized option `-–folder’
What am I doing wrong. I have checked the path and it is right. Anyone? any ideas?
Yay! I was able to boot my 2GB USB, using Mac OS X Tiger, on my PowerPC G4 iMac. I didn’t even need to enable USB booting in the Open Firmware. I only needed to install BaseSystem.pkg, enable ownership permissions, bless the USB and enable USB booting through the terminal, not Open Firmware. In spite of being presented with a -1 error in the terminal and not being able to configure the Startup Disk in System Preferences, I was still able to boot from the USB by holding down the option key at Startup. After what seemed like forever, I was presented with a welcome message and a registration form. I completed that and waited… Finally, the desktop and the dock appeared. Wow!
I now have an image that boots Intel and PPC macs from a single volumes on a firewire drive which is formatted APM. It’s a wonderful tool. I just wonder how it would be possible to get the size down as it’s 10GB. I think the image I have came from Apple . . .
hi, thank you very much for the advice – I used it to set up my ibook, after my HD died on me, and since the optical drive is dead for quite some time, your instruction was the only solution aviable…
thanks to that I got disk utility running again and right now I’m installing the disk image to the hard drive via usb, since pacifist left out some files….
@George Behrman: I had the same problem, try:
sudo bless –folder /Volumes/macOSX2/System/Library/CoreServices/ -–bootinfo /Volumes/macOSX2/System/Library/CoreServices/bootx.bootinfo
-–bootefi /Volumes/macOSX2/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi
–setBoot –verbose
Hi George Behrman,
I had the same problem that you, and searching on the web I found this command that worked for me :
bless –folder “/Volumes/yourdisk/System/Library/CoreServices” –bootinfo –bootefi
I’m on 10.5.7
Thank you for this amazing tutorial
It was a fun experience ^^
Ok, I successfully booted my 1.67 GHz G4 powerbook 15″, the one that will not boot correctly using the above method. Allow me to elaborate on what I did:
After installing OS X as described above, I determined the BSD name for my partition (i.e. disk0s10). I entered Open Firmware with Option-Command-O-F, then determined that my usb stick was plugged into usb0, as “devalias” calls it. So at a prompt I typed
boot usb0/disk:10,\\:tbxi
where usb0 is the usb port I’m connected to (I guess), and disk:10 refers to the partition number as I determined in Disk Utility. I was then booting into OS X! It took forever though. And I have to enter Open Firmware if I want to boot from the USB drive, as I can’t figure a way to automate the task. No big deal given how long the bootup takes anyway.
To give credit where credit is due, I based my solution off of the information I found at this link:
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org/msg03715.html
I just loaded Tiger onto an APM 1Gb disk for the PPC Macs I use. I tried using this same tutorial for Intel Macs on a GUID disk unsuccessfully. I’ll come back to that soon enough, maybe using Snow Leopard and a bigger thumb drive.
Terminal log:
pem297748matx:~ sprale$ sudo bless -verbose -folder “/Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices” -bootinfo
OpenFirmware found at IODeviceTree:/openprom
OpenFirmware model is ” OpenFirmware 4″
Mount point for /Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices is /Volumes/iTote
Common mount point of ‘/Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices’ and ” is /Volumes/iTote
Opened dest at /Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX for writing
0x0002B000 bytes preallocated for /Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Type/creator set to tbxi/chrp for /Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
Setting UF_IMMUTABLE on /Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
BootX created successfully at /Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX
No boot.efi creation requested
Got directory ID of 10540 for /Volumes/iTote/System/Library/CoreServices
finderinfo[0] = 10540
finderinfo[1] = 0
finderinfo[2] = 0
finderinfo[3] = 0
finderinfo[5] = 10540
pem297748matx:~ sprale$
hello, trying this on ibook g4 12″ 1ghz, but will not boot from my 8gb sandisk, but tried to boot on imac g3 600mhz just to see and it worked(of course). anybody get this to work on ibook g4 12″ 1ghz? any help is welcome. thanks! (all)macs rule!
Tried your great advice, but how long should one wait booting from usb1.0 devices? i get the apple logo on grey, then spinning rainbow, then an arrow cursor on blue screen and the timer cursor, quite random mix and last an hour so far! Running 10.3.9 on an emac and used 10.4.0 dvd img during the Pacifist stage.
Any clues Thanks
I am on an Intel MacBook, and everything works fine for a 10.5 installation except after the startup sequence, when the Finder should load, I just see a gray background with the colored pinwheel spinning indefinitely. It looks like something should have loaded that did not. Is SetupAssistant supposed to load then?
Also, you say that Essentials.pkg and BaseSystem.pkg are located in “/Library/Receipts/bom/”, but “com.apple.pkg.Essentials.bom” and “com.apple.pkg.BaseSystem.bom”. Do I copy “/Library/Receipts/bom/” to “/Volumes/myusbdrive/Library/Receipts/bom/” or do I copy “com.apple.pkg.Essentials.bom” and “com.apple.pkg.BaseSystem.bom” to “/Volumes/myusbdrive/Library/Receipts/”? Thanks
My friend and I were recently discussing about technology, and how integrated it has become to our daily lives. Reading this post makes me think back to that discussion we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.I don’t mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside… I just hope that as memory becomes less expensive, the possibility of transferring our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It’s one of the things I really wish I could see in my lifetime.(Submitted on FFV2 for R4i Nintendo DS.)
Memory sure is becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. I wonder when we will finally reach the rate of 1 cent to 1 Gig.I’m eagerly anticipating the day when I will finally be able to afford a 20 TB hard drive, haha. But for now I will be happy with having a 16 gig Micro SD Card in my R4i.(Posted from R4Post for R4i Nintendo DS.)
Thanks for this tip, My DVD Drive not working and it was great headache for me before read your post. but you solved my problem, thanks again.
Firstly, thanks VERY much for all your hard work in putting this howto together. Well done!
I used your procedure to make a small bootable partition on one of my hard drives. I installed from my Tiger 10.4 (2Z691-5305-A) retail install DVD. It worked great, but I encountered a problem: When I tried to use Software Update to update 10.4 to 10.4.11, it kept crashing.
Turns out, it’s a known issue, and I found the solution on Apple’s support site:
1. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
2. Click Network to display its preference pane.
3. From the Show pop-up menu, choose Network Port Configurations.
4. Select the Built-in Ethernet checkbox to enable the port.
5. Click Apply Now.
I don’t know why it worked, but it did, so I’m posting it here in case anybody else has the same problem.
Howdy! This is my 1st comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and tell you I truly enjoy reading your articles. Can you recommend any other blogs/websites/forums that cover the same subjects? Thank you so much!
On 10.6 the receipts are in the “/private/var/db/receipts” folder.
WORKZ!!!
Thanks a lot for the tutorial.. works flawlessly using Tiger 10.4, 2GB USB Key and iBook G3 600.. USB key was prep using 2010 Macbook Air running Snow..
Thanks for the post I actually learned something from it. Very good content on this site Always looking forward to new post.
To everyone with problems when bless´ing the drive:
This Website breaks some characters. It changes the Inch-sign to a typographically correct „quote“, and the minus-character to something else also.
Just remove every – and ” when copy-paste-ing and type it in again manually. Even it LOOKS the same it isn´t.
Bye, Jörg
I am stocked at
Now we need to copy the package receipts for BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg onto our flash drive. Open your main hard drive again, and go to /Library/Receipts. Copy both BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg over to /Library/Receipts on your flash drive.
Cannot acces or do not know where to acces this file Recipt
OS 10.3.9 on PowerMac G4 (with hard drive error that disk utility can’t fix) and same system on working G4 PowerBook. I have all the disks. Trying to build bootable system on SanDisk 8 gB.
The very clear and detailed procedure worked fine with the following exceptions:
1. Nothing about ownership was visible. Maybe not a Panther thing? I skipped past this.
2. The two receipts files had to be found by searching. After that they copied okay. Maybe Mac has ‘invisible files’? (I’m fairly new.)
3. When doing the bless, the ‘-bootinfo’ gives a ‘no option’ error — it wants a file. Giving it ‘bootx.bootinfo’ doesn’t help — it cannot find that file. By searching I found this file on the working system disk at: ‘usr/standalone/ppc/bootx.bootinfo’. I provided that same path to the ‘-bootinfo’ and that bless worked without anything I recognized as an error, although in over a screenful of Greek there could well have been something I missed.
The drive does not appear to disk utility to have an OS X system installed so I cannot repair permissions. It DOES show up in the list of bootable devices when booting with OPTION on the bad machine but seems to get an error loop with indications that it is trying to boot from the flash drive. On the good PBook it doesn’t show up to OPTION boot but you can set boot device to it; the boot, however, never happens; there is intermittent activity on the SanDisk.
I have one more thing to try now — maybe the bootinfo file needs to be in the system/library/coreservices file? I’ll try putting it there. I may also try using CCC to build the flash drive. Any further thoughts appreciated.
Nearly five years later this remains the only clear discussion of this topic that I have been able to find. MANY, MANY THANKS!
The absence of the ability to boot from some cheap and portable external device in an emergency — plus the tool itself — (As Windows has long provided a bootable recovery disk) is the only bit of childish design I’ve encountered in the Mac world. Generally speaking this few-months conversion experience has been a pleasure. The admonition in the Mac documentation for disk errors that DU won’t fix that they should be rare and that in such cases you need a third party disk recovery tool does not cover for this omission.
It does appear that more modern OS’s make building a bootable flash drive easier.
I can’t find Essentials.pkg and BaseSystem.pkg in the receipts folder ? Help asap please
Hi ,
I’m trying to create a useful usb key with leopard (suitable for G5 power mac), I’ve made all steps listed here above (and some google search about new *.pkg location) but I can’t perform full boot, while machine start, there is an hang point with a dark grey screen & a spinning rainbow wheel (moving mouse wheel change location on screen), light on usb key flash (then i believe mac read or write data).
I have also try to boot in single user mode with success, so my idea is, OSX Base System has been install fine and the only problem is about FINDER.
There are someone have try like me, to create a usb with leopard for ppc or can help to sort out from this problem.
Regard Nemo
p.s.
and go like a rocket to the moon 
!
I’ve also made (with success) a usb key with tiger, with service pack level 10.4.11
First, big thanks to Brad for this post…four or five years after the fact! Still good, mostly, with just a few tweaks.
I’m on a G4 PPC MacMini (2005) using Boot ROM v. 4.9.4f0. My particular setup is a bit of a challenge: I have 10 or more external USB hard drives, plus least 5 USB Hubs. Plus the flash drive I would use for this project.
I had an extra 4GM SanDisk Cruzer, so that’s what I used. First, in Disk Utiity (I’m on 10.4.11, even today), don’t use the “Erase” tab. Instead, use the “Partition” tab. Highlight the device, not the Volume, and choose your 1 partition, uncheck “OS 9 Drivers,” and click open the “Options” button to bring up the partition type. There, you choose “Apple Partition Map.” Then click “Partition” and in less than a minute your drive will be formatted properly for the install.
Next, thanks, Brad for providing the sudo command to Enable Owners. That is a crucial step.
After that, you’re ready for Pacifist. What a great, great app that is. Pacifist is basically the star of the show. You couldn’t do this project without it. The version I have did the File Permissions repair, but after I copied over the Setup Assistant app and the Package Recepits, I used Disk Utility anyway to repair permissions, and it still found a bunch to repair.
As far as the bless command, thanks for that as well. I got a result like one of the above posters — basically a long readout, but it essentially said that a BootX file was created. I got the same, exact result whether I used one hash or, after reading some of the comments, two hashes. I ended up going with two hashes, but like I said, the bless command worked even with one hash. The BootX file was created, because when I re-typed the command with two hashes, it overwrote the previously created BootX file.
Anyway, after making it through Brad’s instructions, I was ready for the Open Firmware stuff. After a couple-two hours of trial and error, I finally figured out how to identify my device on the ridiculous device tree of mine (just about every USB drive is named “3.”), and I got the boot command to work, but only after fiddling with the placement of the colons (:), which in my case had to come AFTER, not before, the disc id number, e.g., “ud6:”, not “ud:6″. I don’t know if that’s because of the particular Boot ROM version I have or what. I mean, Anyway, I finally got the computer to boot up off the flash drive, and once it did (very, very slowly), I even installed the 10.4.11 combo update from a .dmg file that I had previously downloaded and saved. I also downloaded a Java Update through Software Update just to make sure that it worked. Everything did fine.
So, this project works. Now, I’m going to do it on an actual USB drive, which will be much faster and more functional than a flash drive. But this was good practice. Now I know what to do, what to expect, and how to get it to work.
Thanks again, Brad and the above posters who shared their experience, tips and hints. Glad I came across this page.
Cheers!
Thanks for this useful post. Here’s what I would like to do, but I don’t think your method will work, and I haven’t been able to find a post that shows how to do it. Maybe you can help..TIA if so.
I want to KEEP 10.4.11 as my boot drive (I’m on a PPC G4 Mac), but install 10.5 LEOPARD onto an external USB/Flash drive. I have original Leopard Install DVDs and a Firewire DVD reader/writer, so I can boot off the Leopard DVDs.
Everything is straightforward in your post, except when I get to Package Receipts. Since I want to keep 10.4.11 as my boot drive, I won’t have 10.5 Package Receipts to copy over to the new drive.
What do I do about the 10.5 Package Recipts since I have no currently installed 10.5 system? Can I use 10.4 Package Receipts just the same?
Well, I was hoping this would work on my G4 PPC installing Leopard 10.5, but it doesn’t. Everything seemed to go fine up until Pacifist finished copying over all the 10.5 files to the USB drive. The problem is, since I’m booting from 10.4 Tiger and have to keep it that way, there are no Package Receipts to copy over from my running OS X.
But I found out that 10.5 doesn’t use Package Receipts. In the /Library/Receipts folder there are two subfolders: one is “bom” which is the “bill of materials” for each .pkg file that was installed. Those aren’t really package receipts. The other subfolder is “db”, which contains a single SQLite database file of all installed packages. Of course, the file isn’t there.
So, of course, you can’t do any Permissions repair. I tried it and got the DiskUtility error message: “No Valid Packages Found.” But on top of that, once I booted the system, got the Welcome screen and went through all the setup steps, the Finder (I guess) was absolutely DEAD. NO APPLICATION would launch, or more correctly, they would CRASH immediately after being launched. NO APPLICATION AT ALL WORKED.
Even the “Restart” and “Shut Down” choices off the Apple Menu did absolutely nothing. So I had to end up doing multiple hard-reboots of my box. Eventually, I ended up just erasing the whole darn USB drive. I don’t know if I’ll go back to the beginning and try again….It seems like Brad’s well-researched and legitimate hack works ONLY on 10.4 — if you’re booting from a PPC like me. Again, I have to keep Tiger as my boot drive, and I can’t go back into my boot drive and carve out a new 10GB temporary partition on the fly to install 10.5 onto — or can I? If that would be possible, then I could just clone a 10.5 install from that temp partition over to the USB drive…
At any rate, I’m still looking for a way to install 10.5 onto a USB drive while booting from a PPC running 10.4. Any tips would be appreciated.
Good morning & good news (I hope), > head up tiger (10.4.11) with all patch and same useful tools with about 1.5 GB free.
-key two –> leopard < (yes friends you read fine, osx 10.5.8, java & patch) with two language base System and same useful tools like tiker key with about 800 MB free space.
Now I'm arranging all steps to create and fit leopard into 4gb key, i believe in a couple of weeks i can add my experience in this post.
please be patient I'll post ASAP all info, keep in touch
Again lot of thanks to all
p.s.
leopad key boot from:
- G5 mono & dual cpu
- Tibook onyx (550 with 256 of ram),
- now i must try on ibook G4 1.42