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

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.

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?

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!

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.
I’ve also made (with success) a usb key with tiger, with service pack level 10.4.11 and go like a rocket to the moon !

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.

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.

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