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.
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
0×0002B000 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$