Make a Bootable DVD from a HD
Hi:
I have a small HD in a USB case that have Snow Leopard on it and a few repair utils. I got it down to just under 8.5 gb so it will fit on a dual layer DVD. It's booting fine in Intel Macs. What I want to do is make a bootable DVD with that image so I don't have to carry that drive, usb cable and a power doggle around. I tried using disk utility to restore that HD to a DL DVD-R. What I have tied is to restore from the HD to DVD directly and from HD to a DMG, then restore to DVD. so far I have ended up with a couple of unbootable coasters. Any suggestions?
Thanks
Red
I guess I'll do that. Thanks.
I was hoping I could figure out a way to make it work and make a 10.5 image for PPC Macs. I can't boot any of these with USB. Wish there is a Firewire flash drive.
FireWire flash drives do exist, but they're rare. The most common model was the FireFlash from Kanguru. I don't believe they make them any more, however.
If you need both Intel and PPC Mac support, the way I'd head is with a portable 2.5" multi-interface hard drive. A rugged one like this would be ideal, and most these days are bus-powered so you wouldn't need to haul around a wall wart. Beauty part of using a hard drive is that you 1) can partition it and install multiple versions of OS X (to support older Macs that can't run Leopard or Snow Leopard) and 2) use it for file storage should you need to do data recovery. Years ago when I was a desktop tech, a portable drive like that was indispensable...I could install software from it, back up user data, run diagnostics, and even reinstall OS X from it.
ahhhh yes. i remember the days of running norton speed disk from an externally booted 80mb hard drive. i used to have quite a few external SCSI drives..
Wow, I have been looking for a FW 2.5 inch case for a while and they seems to be all USB only. Forgot good old Amazon. Thanks
I was thinking, I have an older Sandisk FW CF reader... Maybe I can get a few 8 gb fast CF cards and do it that way. I still trust flash drives more then mechanical drives when I have to carry them around a lot. Thanks again.
My understanding is that there's some voodoo involved in flagging a DVD as bootable to OS X, since DVDs don't use MBR or GPT partitions like hard drives do.
What I'd recommend instead is picking up an 8GB (or better yet, 16GB) USB flash drive and restoring your image to that. A USB flash drive is IMHO even more convenient to carry around than a DVD, and when it comes time to update your image you don't have to go through the whole process again...you can update the USB drive on the fly. And it'll certainly be WAY faster to boot from than a DVD.
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