Creating a boot disk with minimal system

I just upgraded to Tiger. I have an external FireWire drive that has two partitions. One (large) partition is for a backup of my Mac's entire hard drive. The other (much smaller partition) is a boot drive - that boots from Mac OS 9. It's time to update the OS on the boot drive (and put a copy of Retrospect on it - in case I ever need to recover from a disaster).
My question is, how do I install a "minimal" system (10.4) on the smaller partition, and make it a bootable drive. The partition has 4.0GB of space. (I hope 4 gigs is enough.)
I apologize if this question is already answered elsewhere on this site. I looked in the knowledge base and in several forums and couldn't find the answer.

Hi Clinto
Those 'minimal' installs date back to a time when you could run a Mac with just the System, the Finder and a couple of extensions. (Well I exaggerate but you know what I mean.)
They would omit most extensions, inits and control panels (QuickTime, AppleScript, networking, printer drivers etc etc), the idea being that you could squeeze the bare bones of the OS onto a floppy and boot in an emergency.
When you install OSX you are offered options not to install printer drivers or foreign language packages. And that's about as minimal as it gets. All the key technologies do get installed, along with the standard-issue applications like Safari, Mail, TextEdit... They're inextricably linked in a way that the elements of the different Classic OS's never were.
The page referred to above says you need a minimum of 3GB of install space for Tiger.
Hope this helps.
H

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Create new boot disk with existing settings.

Hello.
I am soon going to be installing a SSD to supplement my HDD on my Macbook Pro, I would like to install Mountain Lion on the SSD, I am familiar with how to do this but I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to retain all existing settings and appearance etc. The size of the SSD is 256gb and the HDD is 512gb otherwise I would just use a program to carbon copy it however I have too much information to do that, is there any way of cloning just the OS part of the drive or something similar?
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In theory, yes. You might need to control - click on the item you want to restore which gives you a restore to option. I think I would enter Time Machine from the HDD system you now have installed to minimize the possibility the backup wouldn't recognize the SSD.

I have a new macbook pro 2,6 Ghz i7, 8GB 1600Mhz internal ram. He will not boot from an external disk with operating system Snow Leopard

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These Macs shipped with 10.7, and will run nothing older than that:
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Help creating a boot disk for ailing powerbook (and journalist!)

Hello, I'm a journalist with a desperate need to recover my Mac.
My Powerbook G4 (operating 10.4.8 I believe) was working fine until I did the latest suggested Mac software upgrade of Safari. Immediately Safari stopped responding hanging up or quitting. So I tried the next recommended update, thinking perhaps the two went together: Security 2008-009 I believe. It required a restart, which I did. (Note: I didn't do the recommended Java or Quicktime update at the same time because I'm currently working in Sierra Leone with terribly slow internet and figured I'd get to it later).
Now, however, the computer won't boot up. I hear the tone, I get the gray screen with the apple, I get the blue screen, I get the opening OS X screen and the blue progress bar, which then quits early on. Then I get a blue screen of alternating hues, which continues infinitely.
I tried all the Apple and web-suggested fixes. I cannot enter safe mode and can only perform functions with the single user mode. I've tried fsck and it said my HD is fine. The problem, I suspect, would be easy enough to fix if I could just reinstall OS X with my CD. However I am currently 7000 miles from home and CD, and in desperate need of my laptop in order to continue my volunteer work.
I do have access to a friend's MacBook Pro 10.4.9 and the internet. I have downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner... however I don't know which files I need to copy in order to create a boot disk. Nor do I know how to create a boot disk to actually put into my computer. I have also been scared by the CCC literature that says I need to erase the target volume... which in this case is my external hard drive containing all of our video footage from the last 8 months!
I use my computer every day, however I am a newbie at using things like Terminal and higher order functions that these occasions seem to require. CCC's Help manual, for me, might as well have been written in hieroglyphs (which, come to think of it, would have been easier as I seem to understand pictures well enough).
I would be eternally grateful for any simple or step-by-step advice which might help me get back to work. I'm training African journalists, and without my computer to edit, we cannot do a thing!
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Here's some trouble shooting methods that I've copied from Apple KB articles:
Resetting PRAM and NVRAM
Shut down the computer.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously.
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time. Release the keys.
If zapping the PRAM doesn't work, try resetting the PMU.
Warning: Resetting the power manager also resets date and time settings. Performing a PMU reset returns the iBook and PowerBook hardware, including NVRAM, to default settings and forces the computer to shut down.
PowerBook G4 (DVI) and PowerBook G4 (1 GHz/867 MHz)
If the computer is on, turn it off.
Disengage the two keyboard latches located between the Esc and F1 keys, and the F11 and
F12 keys. (You may also need to disengage the keyboard locking screw located between the
F5 and F6 keys.)
Lift the keyboard. To ensure no harmful static electricity is transferred to the computer,
properly ground yourself before performing this procedure.
Press and release the reset button located on the upper right side of the logic board near the power button, shown here. Wait 5 seconds.
Press the power button to restart the computer.
PowerBook G4 and PowerBook G4 (Gigabit Ethernet)
If the computer is on, turn it off.
Press and release the reset button located on the rear panel of the computer between the
external video and modem ports. Wait 5 seconds.
Press the Power button to restart the computer.
HTH!

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How to create os boot disk

Hi, folks,
I have a white 13" MacBook and a duo core iMac. Both are running Snow Leopard. My laptop has an apparent hard drive problem, and I want to boot it with the CD. My problem: I can't find the darn disk!
So, is there a way I can create an OS disk on my desktop machine and use it to boot the laptop?
Thanks very much!

Call Apple, give them a nominal handling fee and your unit's serial number.
They will send you replacements.
In the meantime, you can try to prevent "unfortunate" loss. If you have not done so, then:
Download CarbonCopyClone for free
Buy an external, self-powered disk (FireWire800 is 2x as fast as USB)
Make a clone of your startup disk. It is a bit-by-bit clone, fully bootable.
If your system will live long enough to do that, you will have *something* to recover with if problems get worse before your new install disks arrive.
If the system is simply trying to avoid bad HD sectors, the clone should be usable in a pinch. Other HD issues *may* make the clone unusable, but at lesst you will be *trying*.
I am not suggesting that the problem not be pursued, just suggesting some "immediate defense" action.

Creating external boot disk from an earlier time?

I've put a lot of progs on my MBP. No probs with that, but for my work, should it ever go down, I'd like to have a boot-able external drive with only the progs I need at the time so I can be back up and running asap. (Yes, I know I should have thought of this earlier.)
I could uninstall all the new stuff, create a boota-ble drive, then re-install...
but I don't want to.
So is there a way to create a boot-able drive from an earlier time using TM? so that, for instance, it could boot up to what it used to be a month ago? In theory all the data is there in TM to do just that...
or
Here's a workaround: Can I take the MBP to a month ago and create a boot-able drive, then use TM to come back to the present?

Karel Bata wrote:
So is there a way to create a boot-able drive from an earlier time using TM?
Try restoring from the previous TM backup to a clean disk or partition. Then use SuperDuper or CarbonCopy Cloner to create a bootable clone.
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Mirror boot disk with soft partitions

We've been investigating Solaris Volume Manager with Solaris 9 and have some questions. We currently use DiskSuite 4.2.1 to mirror our boot disks on Solaris 8. The fact that SVM is integrated into the kernel on Solaris 9 got us thinking. Here are some questions I would greatly appreciate answers to:
1. Is it possible to have your boot disk partitions (/root, /var, swap) be soft partitions and then mirror the soft partitions (so disk 1 you'd have 3 soft p's and on disk 2 you'd have 3 soft p's and create the mirror from them)?
2. What would the problems be with this? The major one we could foresee is not being able to see your /root, /var and swap partitions in the case of having to boot from the CD, but if SVM is in the Solaris 9 kernel, wouldn't that solve that issue. Is this a problem? Are there other issues/problems we're not thinking of?
3. Finally, is having your boot partitions be mirrored soft partitons a supported configuration from Sun?
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[email protected]

Hi,
micmac95 wrote:
The reason the HDD is split into two partitions is so if there is an error with the OS, they can reinstall it without affecting the user files.
Makes sense in a way. But does this 'they can reinstall...' imply that you don't have the OSX Install DVD for your Mac ?
Cause you need that DVD for installing the BootCamp Drivers of it !
I do have admin, and I can re-partition my HDD, but I cannot touch the OS partition.
If I set it up like this: http://micmac95.fileave.com/HDD%20setup.png , by shrinking the USER partition, will I be able to install windows on the BOOTCAMP partition?
Personally I never tried this 'Shrinking one partition to make another partition' approach with BootCamp.
But, if you don't have one now is the time to make a complete backup of all the things on your Mac !
Before 'fumbling' with partitions I always make sure to have a backup.
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How do I create a boot disk?

This seems like it should be fairly simple - sort of a Mac 101 question, yet I've been searching and unable to find a simple way to do it. Here's my problem:
We are traveling for a year and I foolishly packed away all my CD's - including the Tiger install disk, somewhere deep in our storage unit which is now far, far away. I've already had to drop my laptop off at an Apple Store along the road to get the hard drive replaced on this trip, and they returned it to me with Panther installed, since that was the original OS when I bought it. Fortunately, I had good backups between CarbonCopy Cloner and Backup, and everything is as it was with Tiger, etc.
BUT, I would like to be able to have a backup of just the OS, for emergencies, and using diagnostic tools or doing repairs as needed. I realize I can use CCC to make a bootable disk image on one of my external drives, but I don't know how to just make it of the System for booting/repairs/reinstalling without including all 80 GB of what's on my hard disk... and my external drives are filling up with photos and backups, so that's why I'd like it on a CD or DVD if possible.
I've only used CCC a couple of times and it's fantastic, but I'm at a fairly rudimentary level in my understanding of creating disk images... Should I use CCC or Disk Utility, for example?
Also, I do NOT have Toast or the like, just the built-in software - can I still create a bootable CD/DVD?
Out here on the road my internet connection is spotty and bandwidth not always great, so I'd probably prefer not to download new programs, but if necessary, I could.
Thank you for your help, all you wonderful Mac folk!
Maggie

Okay, I checked out SuperDuper! and it looks great - I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy it (or at least download the free trial), but it still won't allow making a CD/DVD - it says on the website:
Please note that SuperDuper! is not designed to back up to CDs, DVDs or Tape, and needs a location (other than the boot volume) to store the backup - typically a volume on an internal or external (FireWire) drive.
Note also that USB drives do not allow booting Power PC based Macintoshes under any version of Mac OS X: this is not a SuperDuper! limitation, but one of the OS. If you would like to boot from a backup stored on an external drive, and have a Power PC based Mac, please purchase a Mac compatible FireWire drive.
So... I guess I could probably do the same with CarbonCopy Cloner, or get SuperDuper! and partition one of my firewire drives to have a section used for the bootable disk.
Another basic question - if my laptop won't startup for some reason, how would I boot from a firewire drive? I know how to start up from a CD in this situation (it just happened recently when my hard drive went bad - "horrible clicking noises" and all - I could boot from the TechTool Deluxe CD and confirm that yes, my hard drive was bad, but I couldn't access any files. Fortunately I had seen (or heard) the proverbial handwriting on the wall and backed up everything, so I was good, but I wanted a little more access than just one program's diagnostics.)
Anyway, thanks for the recommendation - I will check it out.
Maggie
Aluminum Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

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Hello,
Well... you have a problem. : )
The easy solution that i can remember it's.... Buy a usb floppy disk.
Sorry, but it's the only think that i can remember.
Software developer
www.mcm-electronics.com
PS: Don't forget to rate a good anwser ; )
Currently using Labview 2011
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my power mac froze, and won't boot. i'm running 10.4
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safe mode won't work. freezes on grey start up screen.
system CD in drive, won't boot from holding down "c"
held down option and selected CD and finally got to disk utility.
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happens over and over.
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Error: the underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)
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Create PXE Boot disk

We are having issues with our clients not being able to receive an address from the imaging server, so while our networking team fixes that problem I would like to create a cd/floppy that I can use to point the client computers to the imaging server to continue our testing of imaging. I tried to use zimgboot.exe from the sys directory on the server but it does not work? Any help would be appreciated.
ZfD version 6.5.2
Andy

I just tried to pxe boot 4 workstations using the same jack and found 3 of the 4 cannot find the boot file while trying to pxe boot. From what I can tell I see no differences, besides the mac addresses. They are all hp d530 SFF machines with the same pxe client ( pxe2.1 Build 082 v 6.1.2) and broadcom netxtreme Gig network cards. At this point I'm not sure what else I can look at in trying to resolve this issue.
I also check a few other workstations with different pxe clients and network cards and they cannot boot into pxe either.
>>> Marcus Breiden<[email protected]> 12/09/2007 9:15 AM >>>
On Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:16:53 GMT, Andy_DeWees wrote:
> Although the imaging server and workstations are on different subnets, but the 2 computers that work are on a different subnet, then when I plug another computer into that same jack I get the error message.
hmm.. same network card in those boxes?
If you have already compiled drivers or have linux.2 please put them on
http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmo...ect/?zfdimgdrv
Live BootCd and USB Disk from Mike Charles
http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?imagingx
eZie http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?ezie
Marcus Breiden
If you are asked to email me information please remove the - in my e-mail
address.
The content of this mail is my private and personal opinion.
http://www.didas.de

No boot disk found when system is turned on

Hello all, and thanks in advance for answering my question. I booted my intel based iMac from an Ubuntu Linux live cd to install Linux to a partition that I had set aside using disk utility but did not end up installing Linux. When I restarted the computer after removing the Linux CD, the screen was white for a few seconds longer than normal and then an error message appears saying that now bootable volumes were found and please insert a bootable disk and so I put in the OS X install disk that came with the computer but it still refusies to boot and does not respond to key presses at power on so I cannot eject the OS X DVD. Any thoughts on how to fix this?

Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
Have you tried starting up while holding the Option Key? That will take you to startup manager and you can select the startup disk.
When you started from the OS X DVD, did you do that while holding the C key?
You can also do the PRAM reset by starting up while holding command-option-P-R keys.

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And what happens if the OPs Mac is of a newer version that came with a version of Snow Leopard above the 10.6.3 version that is on that Retail, meant for Upgrade, disc? Like if it came with 10.6.4/.5/.6/.7? That disc you linked to would not work.
He needs to contact Apple and get a replacement set of Original System Reinstall Discs. That is the only way he can be assured it will work and he would also get the iLife apps which he wouldn't buying that DVD disc you linked to.
dwb wrote:
The Snow Leopard DVD is $20 from Apple. You'll just have to wait a few days. BTW this is a full installer that works with any model computer that can run SL. Apple used to ship recovery/installation disks that were tied to specific computer models so that a 15" MBP installer disk coudn't be used on a 13" MBP computer. So you need either full installer or the recovery disks for your specific model.
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Creating a boot disk with minimal system

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