Install and boot osx on a flash drive

I was looking at this tutorial:
http://tech.bradbergeron.com/guides/howto-install-and-boot-os-x-on-a-flash-drive /
I have a PowerBook G4 12" (ppc) and I want to see if I can get it back up and running. The problem is that the internal optical drive and the hdd are both broken. I would like to create an installer on usb and deploy a working osx installation to a flash drive. I know this is officially supported with osx on intel based machines but not ppc. However, the hack in the article above shows a way that you can run osx from a usb flash drive. My father has a MacBook Air so I can get access to Disk Utility and Pacifist but before I try it I think I might get stuck at the point where you have to copy SetupAssistant, BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg from the hdd of your working copy of osx (remember I don't have one because the hdd is broken). Either the versions of these files on his machine (10.8) will be different from my 10.6, or they won't exist. Is there a way that I can extract them from the disk or get them from the net.
I know what you're thinking, (just get a new machine already). But I'm really interested in tech and thought it would be nice if I could bodge a solution to this problem together.
Also, this hdd is the second hdd now and I only installed it 2 months ago. The machine is 9 years old. My friend in irc said that it could be a fault somewhere else that caused the incredibly short life span of the new hdd.
I realize this is a wild stab in the dark but I also thought about being able to create and installer for Ubuntu and deploying a working installation of that OS to this machine.
Of course I am only doing this as a matter of interest. It is not because I am too poor to buy a new laptop.
Wisey

Some articles that may help you.
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/11128/how-do-i-make-my-1-5-ghz-powerboo k-g4-boot-from-a-usb-stick
http://lifedigital2010.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/how-to-install-mac-osx-from-usb- on-powerbook-g4/
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20061017084322177

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How to Install and boot-up New Blank Hard Drive

I am looking to install a new hard drive on my 2007 MBP C2D. I currently have a stock 200GB 5400rpm Toshiba hard drive installed and I am looking to upgrade. I was looking at a Seagate momentus 320GB 7200rpm SATA or a Western Digital 500GB 5400rpm SATA. Would I have any problems with either of these drives, and would I see significant improvement in performance if I went with the 7200rpm drive?
I was also looking to start fresh with the new drive, only copying and pasting some files from my old drive to the new one. I would do this by first copying the files I want from my old drive to an external, and then copy them to my new drive once it is installed. My questions are do I need to format the new drive? How do I install Leopard? Would I simply put the DVD into the disk drive and install it from there? I've read about partitioning issues and other installation problems; will I have to deal with these by installing it this way?
Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

All of my external hard drives are Western digital. I am pretty sure that they can only be formatted in FAT32, is that going to be a problem if I decide to clone my current hard drive?
FAT32 is not Mac OS X bootable. If you must have PC readable hard drive that is Mac bootable, get http://www.mediafour.com/macdrive
That will allow your PC to read your Mac drive.
If you want to setup a small network:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2959?viewlocale=en_US
You can still maintain the Mac booting by formatting your drive HFS+, and the PC will still be able to share files with your Mac.
Regardless you can't clone a Mac OS X bootable drive to a FAT32 formatted drive. And there is no such thing as a hard drive that can't be formatted HFS+. They may come initially formatted FAT32, but Apple's Disk Utility can reformat them.
I don't know what restrictions exist in event you run Boot Camp though. For that you'd have to ask in the Boot Camp forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1244
Would a 7200rpm drive show significant performance advantages over a 5400rpm drive?
If the drives are of equal capacity yes. Larger capacity but slower drives actually are the nearly the same speed as the faster drives of smaller capacity. I.e. a 120 GB 7200 RPM drive is going to be of equivalent speed to a 160 GB 5400 RPM drive.
Also, the one reason why I want to start fresh is because my computer sometimes runs slow, which it never did in the first few months that I had it.
The speed of the machine is not necessarily as dependent on capacity, as how full it is*:
http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html
Thus as long as you don't approach the arbitrary 85% full point, and as long as all the software you are using has been tested with the currently installed operating system, and as long as your spotlight indexes are complete, and you aren't running any non-compatible optimization utilities, you should never have a slowdown. See my other FAQ*:
http://www.macmaps.com/Macosxspeed.html
to understand why a machine may slow down.
A 10 GB free hard drive sounds like it lacks the necessary empty capacity to run smoothly.
Cleaning the space as suggested earlier may be an easier approach than trying to install a new drive.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

I erased my HD. Now I can't instal mountain lion from my bootable flash drive, and keep getting "installation error. Try again."

I bought mountain lion, made a bootable flash drive.
I booted from it and it went to upgrading right away!
So I stopped it and went to my former recovery partition I erased my HD because I wanted a clean start.
Now I can't instal mountain lion from the bootable flash drive, and keep getting "installation error. Try again."
and there is no 4 choices window.
I don't know what to do.

How did you create the USB install thumb drive? If it was with Disk Utility I have run into this problem and have since used THIS program to make the USB install drive.
As to your problem you only have one option and that is to Reinstall the Original OS X version that came on your computer or if you still have the Lion Recovery Partition use that to reinstall Lion. Or if you system came with Lion and you have No Lion Recovery HD Partition you can boot the system from over the internet and Reinstall Lion.
At startup hold down the Command+Option+r keys until you saa a spinning Globe in the center of the screen. Once that loads Repartition the drive as One partition and then reinstall Lion.

How do I install and BOOT Windows 7 on External Hard Drive?

Please please please help! I've been browsing the net for 2 days straight and can't find a decent answer.
I've partitioned my external hard drive (Western Digital Passport) using Disk Utility.
I have 4 paritions in total; 2 intended for Mac and 2 intended for Windows.
I used a GUID partition table for all 4 as displayed on the below picture.
Although I should note that when my external hard disk is booted in Windows it says that it uses Master Boot Record, please see picture 2 below.
I formatted the Mac Partitions to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the Windows Partitions to ExFat.
The Macs work beautifully; having successfully installed and booted Snow Leopard on them, and then backed up my 2 internal Mac Drives to them.
However, the Windows ones are a complete nightmare and I have no idea how to installl Windows 7 and then use them from there.
Can anyone offer a solution? I've heard so many conflicting ideas about this that it's made me dizzy just reading it all.
Thanks!

Yeah, I use Windows on bootcamp for both my Imac and my Macbook Pro.
In fact, seeing as my Mac partition on my external hard drive was successful i.e. I installed and can boot from them any time I like, couldn't I just use the external hard drive's partitions' bootcamp assistant and install/boot windows on there?

Can I install and boot mac os x 10.6.8 on a new mac mini model A1347 which shipped with osx 10.8.3? I need to run a custom application using Mac OS X 10.6.8.

Can I install and boot mac os x 10.6.8 on a new mac mini model A1347 which shipped with osx 10.8.3?
I need to run an application customized using Mac OS X 10.6.8 on this new mini.

Hi, not normally, but you can run a Virtual Machine, using 10.6 Server within...
Parallels...
http://www.parallels.com/
VmWare Fusion...
http://www.vmware.com/mac
VirtualBox...
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Booting from a USB Flash Drive and Optimizing Performance

I know that you can boot Leopard from a USB flash drive, and I have a 16GB flash drive I'm using as a bootup disk on this 2006 MacBook I have that has a broken hard drive (it was recalled, but the recall ended in 2010).
The problem is that it's very slow. I have about 8GB of free space on it, so it can't be the VRAM being too small. The USB speed just stinks. There must be ways to optimize the OS to run off of a slow drive by accessing data as infrequently as possible. What can I do to speed this up? Should I disable hard disk sleeping? Should I use some kind of Mac tuneup/optimization tool's feature?
I plan to get an internal hard drive for it, but I'm stuck with this for a while.

Not all USB2 Flash drives are equal, in fact I bought 2 16 GB USB drives for cheap, as along side of them were even the same brand 16 GB Flash Drives just a different model, for 5 times as much!
Me was thinking how bad could they be? Well, they could be 5 times worse than other USB2 flash drives... LOL on me!
They under extremely rare occasions will Read or Write at 5 MB/s, & very often 1 MB/s...
My Buffalo Flash drives do near USB2's top speed, see some diffs...
http://usbspeed.nirsoft.net/
Optimizing yours will give little benefit.
You could also do a USB2 RAID0 setup if you have enough ports.

How to install windows 7 in bootcamp from flash drive os x 10.9.1

How to install windows 7 in bootcamp from flash drive os x 10.9.1

oooHideooo wrote:
It DOESN'T WORK!!
I tried tonnes of method already, and the apple guide method absolutely doesn't work for MacBook Air, 10.9.1
Did you even tried it yourself????!! with Maverick 10.9.1 you will NOT be able to get pass the bootcamp first page:"install window 7". It will give an error msg saying "The installer disc could not be found"
My usb confirmed bootable! I created it with bootcamp, and tested it on a different macbook and it works. But doesn't work on MacBook Air. (Even startup disk doesn't detect it as bootable in Air)
anyone else has a real solution to this problem?
Thousands have successfully tried it themselves and installed Windows on a Macbook Air. Perhaps if you provided some details about what you did and what errors you observed we could help you. The Boot Camp instaructions, if followed, will produce a successful install.

Can't boot from a USB flash drive

I believe this ability was lost after updating to BIOS 80.52 following HP's "strong recommendation".No warning was given that this update would remove this ability and see that "Due to security changes, after this BIOS update is installed, previous versions cannot be reinstalled."
I have tried disabling Secure Boot and enabling Legacy Boot, and tried re-applying BIOS defaults.
Is there a particular combination of BIOS settings that I haven't been able to find?As the warranty on my computer expired in July 2014, the HP Customer Support Contact page won't even accept my request for assistance - despite the "strongly recommended" BIOS update being made available *after* this date. I require the ability to boot from USB flash drives ... how can this now be achieved?
Is there an HP BIOS for a more recent HP product with the JasmineR motherboard (or an AMI or other BIOS) available and how could I install it?
Boot a BIOS flashing program from CD or DVD and somehow bypass the HP BIOS's block on updates? Thanks in advance for any advice

Hi, thanks for the quick reply. I don't have another PC handy but will try to find one. The USB flash drive definitely does NOT appear in the boot menu - even as an HDD or CD/DVD as I have seen mentioned elsewhere as a possibility - and all USB devices are enabled in the BIOS settings and USB HDD and USB Floppy/CD are above rEFInd and all other entries in the boot order. I should also have mentioned that I've tried a (Lexar) USB flash drive prepared approximately a year ago with GParted Live which *has* previously booted the machine, and also different models of flash drives (Toshiba, Transcend) and different methods of preparing them such as burning bootable ISO images with Win32DiskImager, Universal USB Installer and Rufus, and manually creating and formatting a bootable FAT32 partition with diskpart (as per https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200124.aspx) and copying in System Rescue CD/GParted/Clonezilla files, ensuring there is an /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi file. In diskpart, the "attributes disk" command shows that the USB drives are not marked as bootable and "help attributes disk" says READONLY is currently the only disk flag that may be changed. (Don't know if this means anything as the GParted disk isn't "bootable" but did boot) Did the BIOS update disable enumerating USB devices until later in the Windows 8.1 boot process?

I've gotten a kernel panic 4 times in a row while trying to reinstall lion osx from a flash drive to a reformatted hard drive. How is this possible when there's "nothing" on my computer?

My SSD failed and I was instructed to reformat my hard drive and restore my files. I erase my hard drive using Disk Utility and reinstalled Lion from a flash drive. While Lion is installing, I get a kernel panic. That's happened now four times in a row and I'm befuddled because I don't have anything on my computer to conflict right? Please help.

eubiedoo wrote:
Do you think it's ram related?
No way to tell unless you test it. Like I said kernel panics are usually hardware related. Since your Macbook Pro is from the "2009" era, run the Hardware Test disc which you should already have - Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test
Apple Store diagnostic testings are FREE. It's the repairs you are responsible for if out of warranty.

How do I boot from a USB flash drive?

I have two different Toshiba laptops. In the BIOS settings I only see the following options.
Laptop 1:
CD/DVD
FDD
LAN
HDD1/SSD1
Laptop 2:
HDD1/SSD1
HDD2/SSD2
eSATA HDD
CD/DVD
FDD
LAN
Is it possible to make either computer boot from a USB flash drive?
Thanks in advance for any help,
yeto

FDD (Floppy Disk Drive) equates to USB in my Toshiba laptops. Seems like it's taking some BIOS designers a long time to catch up with the rest of the computer world!
C.B.
Toshiba Sat. C75D-B7260 Win 8.1 64 Bit--Toshiba Sat. L775D-S7132 Win 7 HP SP1 64 Bit and Win 10 PRO Technical Preview--Toshiba Sat. L305-S5921 Win Vista SP2 32 Bit

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You'll probably have better responses over in the Boot Camp forum....here's a link for you:
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Moti
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