Install Leopard With An External Hard Drive

thanks for the instructions on installing leopard from the ext. hard drive. just one more thing, does the install progress just as if it were installing for the dvd? in other words, will i lose any data? the restore feature has me a little concerned. thanks, djp

The hard drive partition that you put the image on will be erased - so it is better to do it on an empty partition. The best way to do this is to partition around 8 gigabytes on an external hard drive and use this as the destination drive.
Other than that, the installation is identical to installing from the dvd. You will be given the choice to either upgrade from a previous OS X version or make a clean install by erasing everything.

Thanks for pointing this out. I wasn’t clear in the original post. I’ll update the post to make it clearer.

Hi
I did everything fine, but when i get to the last step to restart from the start-up disk. it’s not there, there’s only network start-up, and the original tiger 10.4, but not leopard 10.5. i have usb ipod video 30gb, all the file that were extrat is on there, but it can not boot. any sugestion.

Do you have any idea how to update winxp/bootcamp after making such an install? Thanks!

Guynel - you may need to repartition you external drive to use the Apple Partition Map. I hope that helps.

Guynel,
i just had the same problem as you and in disk utilities just repair the mac os x install dvd and it should work.

I have tried everything that has been suggested here and I can not get it to work.

I have a:

1.25GHz G4
1GB Ram

I am trying to install it off of a External USB hard drive. Any other suggestions?

@SaucE: Which step isn’t working for you?

I get to the point of selecting the Boot drive. The external drive doesn’t show up as an option.

I think I found a way around my problem, problem being trying to boot from USB on a G4. I put the Leopard image on my external drive (iPod in disk mode), then booted off my Tiger CD. Once in the Tiger installer, I used the disk utility to partition and format the drive. Then I used your steps to add the files to the partition from the Leopard image. Set the boot drive to be the one with the Leopard files, restarted and the Leopard installer fired up. Its still installing but seems to be going perfectly fine. I hope this will help others that were having problems.

Feel free to add my solution to your tutorial if you wish, I have a feeling it will take away some of the frustration other G4 Mac users like myself were or are having.

@SaucE - Great! I’m glad you got it to work. I left a note in the article to let people know of how helpful the comments are.
Thanks for leaving a note on how you got it to work - I’m sure it will help others with the same problem

Will its official, it worked! Posting this from within Leopard now. If it wasn’t for your tutorial, I wouldn’t have got this far, thank you very much.

Congrats SaucE!

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for the comments SaucE, it has helped me install Leopard on my 17″ Powerbook G4 which was having problems with installing from the DVD.

Your instructions were perfect.

Thanks to everyone,
Colin

I am planning on buying an external hard drive but before I do so I just wanted to make sure this definitely works from a USB drive and not just Firewire. Can anyone confirm this? Thanks

@Jordan: Yes, it works with a USB drive for sure.

Hi Jordan,

Absolutely works, I have successfully updated two systems in the last day via this method. I think the only potentially confusing thing from these discussions is that the external HDD is only used to store the .dmg file.

Once you have the .dmg file on the external HDD you need to launch the Tiger install process and then create an extra partition on the actual mac not the external HDD (this is what I initially did).

Then restore the .dmg onto the new partition on the mac and set it to be the start up disk. Worked perfectly for me.

I guess the method I used means you can’t do a upgrade, needs to be a full install as creating a new partition means you will erase everything on the mac.

I hope that helps.

Regards,
Colin

Colin, are you saying there’s no way for me to perform the upgrade process and retain my data without the actual DVD?

Hi Jordan,

The way I did it, I don’t think you would be able to upgrade (please correct if I am wrong - anyone). My mac only had 1 partition on it. So when I went to create a second partition it needs to wipe the info from the 1 partition to create the 2 partitions on the Mac. On the 2nd partition is where I did the restore.

Does that make sense?

This is only the way I have done it, maybe there is another way?

Regards,
Colin

@Jordan: This is going to give you the same exact installation as the one you would get from the actual DVD. I think there are three options - upgrade, install from scratch but keep a backup of current user files, or install from scratch and delete everything.
You can always try this and if you don’t see the option that suits you, exit the installation.

@Colin: That sounds correct. I think you would need to install it on the same partition (where the OSX is currently installed) in order for it to allow you to upgrade. That could be why you weren’t able you didn’t have the option to upgrade.

If you have a Intel Mac, creating the partition on the External drive within Tiger should allow you to upgrade. Intel Macs can boot from USB, the PPC G4 can’t, thats why I had to do mine different.

When I did the install, I had no room left on my internal drive to partition it (Not sure I can once if was already on large partition). I only had music and a few pictures so I just did a backup and did a fresh install. Once the install was done, I booting into Leopard, deleted the partition I had put the install DVD onto and expanded the install partition to fit the rest of the drive.

Since my last post on Dec 29th. I have tried everything on my Power G4 PPC, nothing works when i get to the part to reboot from start-up disk. I did what Sam & Brett post on Jan 1&3, it didn’t works.

But I got it to work using an externatl hardrive with firewire. it does not working using ipod or external hardrive with usb. only with firewire for me. using my fire hardrive the partition shows up on start-up disk, and i simply reboot from that partition, then boom it works.

p.s. SaucE can you please explain step-by-step your post on Jan 4th. it seems to work for everybody, but i’m confusing with it, since i’m not much of a Mac guy. try to post it like Admin post his process. thank you

DISCLAIMER: I cannot guarantee that you will get the option to do an upgrade via this method, so please backup all you data before hand.
1. Plug in your external hard drive.
2. Copy the image file (ie. Leopard.dmg) over to your external drive.
3. Insert your Max OS X 10.4 Tiger disk into the drive. Then open up System Preferences and select Startup Disk. Select the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger DVD drive then restart your Mac.
4. Once your Mac has booted into the installer, go to Tools on the menu bar and select Disk Utility.
5. Select the internal hard drive of your Mac and create 2 partitions. One of 10GB and the other of the remaining hard disk space. (I am not sure if the Disk Utility will allow you to resize a current partition. If it does, make the new partition 10GB. This may allow you to do an upgrade instead of a fresh install.)
6. Once the disk is partitioned, Click on the 10GB partition you just created.
7. Click on the “Restore” tab.
8. In the “Source” field, select the image file (such as leopard.dmg) from your external hard drive.
9. In the “Destination” field, drag the 10GB partition from the Disk Utility drive list on the left onto this field.
Note: Anything on the partition will be erased and replaced with the installation files for Leopard.
10. Click on restore. This may take awhile.
11. Once its done, open up Startup Disk from the Tools menu.
12. Select the 10GB partition with the Leopard Install files on it.
13. Click Restart. The Leopard installation will begin from the external hard drive. This installation is identical to installing Leopard with a DVD.

NOTE: I used some of the text from the original tutorial word for word. I believe I got everything in th e right order.

What am I doing wrong!!! I install leopard correctly on my 15′powerbook ppc. Right now I am using the same exact step to try to install it on a 15′ powerbook it’s just not working. this time i keep getting error message once i’m ready to click restore.

I sometime got this error: Restore Failure “An error (2) occurred while copying. (no such file or directory) when i re-do the steps over i would get this message.
Restore Failure “An error (16) occured while copying. (resource busy).

Can anybody please tell me what exactly i did wrong this time around. because i got to to work previously with a firewire harddrive with no problem. this time it’s not even letting me to restore it to move on.
thank you

I can’t get past the part where it asks what drive to install leopard to. It only shows the 2nd partition on my external drive, not my internal hard drive, which is where I would like to upgrade leopard. Anyone have any suggestions?

hi all,

i am having problems installing leopard too. i am using a macbook and an ipod nano 8gb. i get the image on my ipod and go to start-up disk, select to boot from my ipod but when i restart (and click alt when i hear the chime) all i can select is my macintosh HD.

i need to say i have no partition on my hd and nor on my ipod..

hope anyone can help me!
cheers

i have to add i have try to partition my ipod but it doesn’t let me and i don’t know if there is any way i can save the option of GUID partition when i get to it.
i think by default it was on the one below, for PPC.

isn’t that odd though since i have an intel mac and my ipod was only ever installed on to this?

cheers again

hm.. I left some comments to get help this morning but apparently they have been deleted (I am not sure why?).

anyway, I’ll try this again. so I’ve been trying to install leopard using my ipod as well. I have a macbook and an 8gb ipod nano, none of them is partitioned. actually when I’ve tried to partition the ipod it wouldn’t let me.. and that is the only way to change the Apple partition map to GUID, isn’t it?

because i’ve mounted the image on the ipod several times but once I restart from the start-up disk in system preferences I can’t get to make it work. it just starts tiger as per usual..

can anyone please answer this (and not delete my request of help)?

cheers,
sodax

SAME PROBLEM AS jmoz38’s

Any help???? Thanks.

I can’t get past the part where it asks what drive to install leopard to. It only shows the 2nd partition on my external drive, not my internal hard drive, which is where I would like to upgrade leopard. Anyone have any suggestions?

Same thing happened to me. My message got deleted too. Here it is again.

I have the same problem as jmoz38’s.

Please help!

I can’t get past the part where it asks what drive to install leopard to. It only shows the 2nd partition on my external drive, not my internal hard drive, which is where I would like to upgrade leopard. Anyone have any suggestions?

Messages don’t get deleted. It takes time for them to get approved due to a lot of spam advertisement.

I’m not sure why you are getting that problems - hopefully someone else will know and help you with it here.

how would i go about doing this with a g3 iBook. its a 800mhz but theres a program called leopardassist that “tricks” it into thinking its 867mhz

SaucE,

Something you said in your list above confuses me - steps 5 and 12/13 seem to contradict each other.

5. Select the internal hard drive of your Mac and create 2 partitions. One of 10GB and the other of the remaining hard disk space.
12. Select the 10GB partition with the Leopard Install files on it.
13. Click Restart. The Leopard installation will begin from the external hard drive. This installation is identical to installing Leopard with a DVD.

Am I being obtuse or does this not make sense? It seems like restoring the .dmg to an internal partition would make that internal partition the install disk.

I understand that you could install Leopard on the bigger partition of your internal drive from the smaller partition of your internal drive. But wouldn’t you be left with Leopard on the larger partition of your internal drive, stuck with a 10 gigabyte partition containing the installer that you could not get rid of without erasing the entire internal drive?

Hi!

I did the same as the instr. but I got the message you can no intall leopard from this drive use a dvd.
What do I do?

FOR Guynel

I assume given the timing that you’re trying to install the DMG file that Apple just published for Leopard. I had the same problem, and the solution was to Eject the disk image before trying to burn it or restore it to a disk partition, otherwise it is “busy” when you try to Restore it to a partition in Disk Utility to get the thing install-able.

for Dumitru… Thanks man it works. once i eject the dmg file, and click on restore it. it works fine, and i install it without no problem.
you the man.

I manage to restore the image to an external USB drive, and also select it then in the startup disk menu. However, when it does retart, it just sits there with the spinning wheel. I have left it for over an hour and nothing changes

Any ideas?

phila67

Hey guys, you can boot to usb drive on a G4, when you start up just hold down the option key and it will give you a screen that will give bootable options, even usb drives will show up, and it will boot from them, it’s a little slower but boots just fine. hope this helps.

Hi everyone!

I have followed this tutorial but it doesn’t work.. I cannot do the 10th step. I’ve read the SaucE solution, but it doesn’t work too.

So, I cannot the external hard drive (USB 2.5″) in the Startup Disk tool. The strange thing is that i find it in “Disk Utility” and also if I hold down the option (alt) button on startup (I see a “EFI Boot” Drive).. if I select it, it seems to work but it doesn’t. It is loading something and it takes a lot.. After 20 minutes still nothing..

Can anyone help me?

Sorry for the bad english..

Dario

I was forgetting.. It is a Macbook Pro!

well… it should work, i have a macbook pro too and i do it all the time, it works fine as long as it’s a good install on the external. FYI intels will boot from either an apple partition map or a GUID partition, apple says otherwise but it will i’ve done it. if you lert me know what you did exactly maybe i can figure out where the problem is, well… i’ll do the best i can.

DISCLAIMER: I cannot guarantee that you will get the option to do an upgrade via this method, so please backup all you data before hand.
1. Plug in your external hard drive.
2. Copy the image file (ie. Leopard.dmg) over to your external drive.
3. Insert your Max OS X 10.4 Tiger disk into the drive. Then open up System Preferences and select Startup Disk. Select the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger DVD drive then restart your Mac.
4. Once your Mac has booted into the installer, go to Tools on the menu bar and select Disk Utility.
5. Select the internal hard drive of your Mac and create 2 partitions. One of 10GB and the other of the remaining hard disk space. (I am not sure if the Disk Utility will allow you to resize a current partition. If it does, make the new partition 10GB. This may allow you to do an upgrade instead of a fresh install.)
6. Once the disk is partitioned, Click on the 10GB partition you just created.
7. Click on the “Restore” tab.
8. In the “Source” field, select the image file (such as leopard.dmg) from your external hard drive.
9. In the “Destination” field, drag the 10GB partition from the Disk Utility drive list on the left onto this field.
Note: Anything on the partition will be erased and replaced with the installation files for Leopard.
10. Click on restore. This may take awhile.
11. Once its done, open up Startup Disk from the Tools menu.
12. Select the 10GB partition with the Leopard Install files on it.
13. Click Restart. The Leopard installation will begin from the external hard drive. This installation is identical to installing Leopard with a DVD.

NOTE: I used some of the text from the original tutorial word for word. I believe I got everything in th e right order.

THIS WORKS! first didn’t worked to boot from my external hard drive and install it.. i was getting : Mac os x can’t install from an external drive.. something like that.

But second method works !! thanks dude

forgot to say : i have a macbook 13.3 core2duo 2Ghz 1GB 80GB

I want to use an external hard drive to create a separate startup disk running Leopard. Meanwhile I need to keep the existing hard drive running 10.3 because I have a Final Cut project in progress and cannot upgrade anything. I have a licensed copy of Leopard and want to install it on an external drive to use as an alternate startup disk. However IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT MY CURRENT STARTUP DISK DOES NOT GET UPGRADED and remains on 10.3.

Can anyone offer me guidance? It seems like I could partition the external drive, install Leopard on that partition, and then just select it as my startup disk when I want to use Leopard. When I want to work on my film, I can simply select my original 10.3 startup disk and reboot.

Does anyone know if this will work?

it will work just fine, just startup form your install disk with the external plugged in and if your computer is an intel mac make sure your external is GUID partition, if it’s a power pc which i assume it is if its running 10.3, format the external as APM and install the OS right to the external. (it will let you choose which drive)

Thanks, Mattej. I have a G5 dual 1 ghz (ca. mid-2004). Will I need a firmware update? I hope not because it could compromise my 10.3 system on the internal drive.

I didn’t see any options for GUID or APM partitioning in Disk Utility. I just chose “Mac OS X Extended.” Also, I tried to make a 16 GB partition but it just defaulted to a 113 GB partition on the 120 GB drive. Will these settings work or do I need to re-partition the drive? By the way the drive is an older LaCie 120 GB firewire model. It may be 6 to 8 years old.

no, you won’t need to update anything, it’s fairly painless, i’ve installed leo on several externals, just make sure it’s partitioned as an apple partition map otherwise when you go to choose the drive it won’t show up. then after the install is all finished just choose it as the startup disk from your prefrence pain. good luck!

oh i forgot your running 10.3, yeah mac os x extended is fine, you should be set to go.

Should I choose the external as the startup disk BEFORE running the leopard installation? Or will I have an option to choose it after the installation starts? Currently I cannot see the external among the choices for a startup disk, even though I have partitioned it.

no, wait until after, it won’t let you before because it has to see an OS on it. once OS X is installed you will be able to select it.

my powerbook can’t seem to detect my external hard drive (WD Mybook via firewire) when i do the start up step. tried pressing option while rebooting and all i see is my built in hard drive. how can i make my powerbook detect my external hd so i can install leopard?

you have to open diskutility and format is a osx extended, then it will show up. click on the drive (the top one that has the capacity beside it) and click erase, then select osx extended journaled. then boot from the install disc and you should be able to select it. it won’t show up while holding the option key becouse there is no OS on it. it has to see a System Folder.

I used the instructions by SaucE, which worked for me on my G4. One thing I can’t seem to find. I now have 2 partitions; 10gb with the installation files/70gb with the actual OS, installed. How the heck can I merge these 2 partitions, ’cause I don’t need the 10gb anymore…

i’m not sure if this will work on macs not formatted as GUID but you can try it, open disk utility,

1. click on the drive in the left hand column that has the 2 partitions on it, (it’ll have the drive size next to it)

2. click on the partition button

3. click the partition under ‘volume scheme’ that you want to get rid of and click the little minus button under that window.

it should let you delete it then hit apply and when it’s done if your main partition isn’t resized just resize it in the window under volume scheme and hit apply again and it should resize it.

now like i said i haven’t tried this with the PPC macs yet so if someone already knows if it will work or not just chime in.

I can delete the 10gb partition, but it will show up as ‘free space’. It’s impossible to resize the second partition to fill the entire disk.
So I’m stuck with 10gb’s of free space now, which are just lost… There has to be a way!

This is wat I got now, http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/3313/picture1cu8.png

actually that’s not bad, it just means osx hasn’t recognized the rest of the space yet. try this first… open disk util and click on the partition that os x is on, then click verify disk, if it says that it needs repaired, pop in the install disc and boot from it, open disk util and click on the partition on the left, then click repair disc. then it should show up right…

if not you’ll have to use 3rd party software. do you have a GUID partition or are you running a PPC? you can try these apps.
http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php or…
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/drive_genius.php

ipartition is probably the more user friendly and it will let you burn a bootable disc so you can partition your boot drive and it’s non destructive so it won’t hurt your current install.

how do you merge both discs (one and two) together to create a single image file (am i missing something)?

since i was only able to restore disc one, i was prompted for disc two to be inserted during the installation.

I tried SaucE’s method and it worked perfectly thanks a lot sir.

How were you able to transfer the 6+gb file to your ipod? ipods formatted in fat32, which can’t handle files over 4gb.

anyways, i tried using an external hd, and my ibook detects the drive is there, but will not detect the leopard.dmg or any other files on the drive.

What do i do?

Worked!! like a nice charm!! very cool everything just great!! thanks a lot you are a life saver!!

sorry to say i could not get it to work.
i have it on my external hard drive.and it will not come up on my start up disc any ideas?

am i missing something?

http://www.adrianmils.co.uk

I’m having the same problem as some above. NOBODY has addressed this issue. Using a G4 Powerbook, booting from a firewire drive, when the Leopard install asks for a Destination to install Leopard to, I have NO options. When I click “utilities” at the top and go to disk utility, I see that it hasn’t loaded the partition for my internal HD. Only the External Firewire drive shows a partition.

Why is this happening???? Does anybody know? Thanks!

~Tim

Actually, I just left the screen up for 10 minutes and when I came back, my internal drive was there!

I´ve gone all the way untill the instalation because it´s freezing on the middle. tried 3 times already.

any ideas?

“I’m having the same problem as some above. NOBODY has addressed this issue. Using a G4 Powerbook, booting from a firewire drive, when the Leopard install asks for a Destination to install Leopard to, I have NO options. When I click “utilities” at the top and go to disk utility, I see that it hasn’t loaded the partition for my internal HD. Only the External Firewire drive shows a partition.

Why is this happening???? Does anybody know? Thanks!

~Tim”

if it’s a g4, you need to make sure that it is formatted as APM not GUID. or it won’t show up as an option to install to.

Gosh, I went to best buy and bought a 500 GB firewire western digital external hard drive. Partitioned and followed the instructions above. Selected the hard drive as a start up disk but it doesnt seem to work and all it does and go straight back to the 10.4.x OS. I tried repairing the partitioned disk containing the Leopard but still dont work. I am using 1.25 GHz processor and Powerpc G4 with 512 DDR SDRAM. Someone please help me. I cant read anything from my flask portable hard drive because it is a usb 2.0 and my laptop dont support it. I figured installing Leopard would solve this problem.

Thanks

“I manage to restore the image to an external USB drive, and also select it then in the startup disk menu. However, when it does retart, it just sits there with the spinning wheel. I have left it for over an hour and nothing changes”

I am having the exact same problem. What can I do to fix this?

Is there any way to do this while inside of Windows?
By using software like….
-MacDrive 7
-PowerISO 4.2
-Nero

{quote}
“I’m having the same problem as some above. NOBODY has addressed this issue. Using a G4 Powerbook, booting from a firewire drive, when the Leopard install asks for a Destination to install Leopard to, I have NO options. ”
{quote}

I had the same problem on my MacBook Pro.
I had to wait for about ten minutes to be able to select my internal hard drive.

So, my advice is, wait wait wait…the drive will appear. It did for me.

Best regards
Infoerik

Just one small point that I wanted to add. If you are installing from an external hard drive, be sure to use firewire or USB as e-Sata doesn’t work, at least it wouldn’t for me.

I followed the instructions - best not to rush - and it went smoothly! I’m on an imac

The only thing that was different was that when I was prompted to select where I wanted Leopard to be installed my HD wasn’t present, so I exited and restarted and it then appeared the second time.

Many thanks!

I have a 1.25 powerbook G4 and am trying to restore from a USB Portable HDD. it keeps saying”An error (-119930868) occurred while copying. (Operation not supported)”. and i don’t know wat to do i’ve formatted again and again. restarted it just won’t restore for anything. someone please help!!!

Hi SaucE and all others,

I know you guys are talking about Leopard, but I have the 4 disk version of the Tiger upgrade. I have a PowerMac G4 and running OS X 10.3.9. How can I upgrade if I have the 4 disk upgrade version of OS X 10.4? To be clearer, I have 4 separate dmg’s (install disk 1, disk 2, etc.) Your directions worked for disk 1 (installed from a separate internal hardrive) but when that was done, it asked for disk 2. Evenntually I had to reinstall the original OS X 10.2 that shipped with the G4.

Is it even possible to install from 4 separate dmg’s???

Thanks!!!

hi

installed perfectly on a intel macbook, just have to make sure your usb drive is partitioned as extended (journaled) and as GUID

when i open start up disk i can not see the external hard disk to boot from there what can i do?

Quick question for everyone who has successfully installed Leopard this way…

During installation, did the installer try to perform the consistency check?

You know, this part: http://iuseapple.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/installleopard09.jpg

(Mine didn’t.)

This works great! did everything as instructed… the upgrade feature works great… didn’t have to erase anything.
Thanks a log!

What would happen if I double clicked the install icon that is on my partitioned external harddrive? Would this restore my whole system?

Thanks - this was of great help!

When I try to restore the .dmg file to my external harddrive, I get this error: “Restore Failure “An error (2) occurred while copying. (no such file or directory)”. I tried ejecting the image file, but I get the same error. Is there any solution to this?

Thanks.

Thanks a lot Admin and SaucE.
It is working perfect for me.
I did a LOT of researches about this for several days until I accidently got into your post.
At the begging I encountered with the issue SaucE met and and since I didn’t have any other ideas I went to look for external applications to do this. Then I met the ‘Leopard hd install helper v0.3′ but it was useless for ISOs that larger then ~4Gb.

….And finally I met THIS post..

The highlight is that the external disk MUST be partitioned before else it will not be discovered as ‘Startup Disk’ ‘as SaucE discovered.

Mac does not need anything - it has it all !!!
Thanks Admin for sharing us the information. Life will be easier for me now.

Thanks.

i just have to say that i’m extremely disappointed with apple and how complicated it is to install this from a disk image. i have tried everything you guys have suggested and it seems my options are to either erase everything on my computer, or buy the dvd. i’m tired and i think i’ll just get the dvd, but this is the first time i’m in a mac and feel as it has become a pc.

Not sure if this has been addressed but I found that when it can’t find the hard drive under startup disk, just eject, unplug the hard drive. Give it about 5 seconds, plug it back in(with start up disk still open) and it should refresh and show up Didn’t have this problem on the first Macbook Pro I tried it on, but did on the second, installed after that without a hitch.

Hi,

I have iMac 5.1 (OS X 10.4.11; Procesorn 2,16 Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM, HDD 250 GB) and I want to update to Leopard 10.5.6. I have downlaoaded Mac_OS_X_Install_DVD.dmg (6.71 GiB is the size of the file)from the net and now I am tring to find out how to install it on my iMac from external USB hard drive (WD 160 GB), the thing is that I dont have any Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger DVD or any other disks which comes with the Mac. Is this possible at all? And shall I move to secure location the data I have on the externalhard drive, I mean is making the external hard drive bootable will delete everything on the drive?
Thanks in advance to all who will help!

Dudes!! Remember: PowerPC Macs CANNOT boot from USB drives, only Intel Macs!

Worked like a charm on my Macbook Pro (first generation). The hard part was resizing my partitions on my external as I didn’t want to wipe the drive. Used drive genius for that.

To one and all, after trying all these methods to install leopard and still not being able to get it installed I find a comment from Jorge 6th Feb 2009 that powerpc macs cannot boot from usb drives. This leaves me with the question ‘how do I install the peopard .dmg file’?

regards, swampy.

Sorry it is not a peopard.dmg file but a ‘Leopard.dmg’ I am sure you all new that!!!!!!

Swampy.

I followed this guide exactly, made a dmg from the DVD using my external optical drive and then did the restore of the dmg to my external hd which was freshly formated for mac. That went fine. Then under startup disk option I can see the external drive. I select that and then hit restart and the computer makes some sort of warning tone at me and does nothing. No reboot. Just sits there…?

Oh, this is on a Powerbook G4 12″ 2001 era…so it can’t work from a USB external hd as it has a powerpc processor?

So I’ve switched to firewire on my external drive. Now I can reboot but the installer gives me an error and shuts the machine down before I can read it….

Are you sure Power Mac G5 CANNOT boot from USB drives? I have to get a firewall drive?
Thanks in advance.

Ok, so I had to make a partition (8GB) on the external drive and put the image on this. Then it works.

I’ve got two internal hard drives installed while I’m using Tiger on my PPC G5.

Questions:

If I install from an external USB drive, will it recognize the second volume once I upgrade to Leopard and have it fully running? Or will I have to re-format it so it will recognize it?

Should I unplug the second internal harddrive before the install?

Do you have any recommendations on software available to copy my applications if need be? Or is that even possible?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

I have an ibook g4 and i have leopard on my USB external hard drive partitioned and everything but i have no tiger dvd or firewire hard drive… does this mean i cant install leaopard then?

thanks in advance

Hey,
so i have an intel macbook and i’m stuck on the “restore” step. i’ve practically been waiting all day for it to copy (well maybe not, but a really long time). how long does it usually take? and i’m using a 8gb flash drive, is that my problem? Thanks!

Make the partition.. It works Perfect!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks to all who have helped with this Great step by step!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

so from the above information,it seems the only way to iinstall leopard on my powerbook g4 would be to use a firewire external hard drive or burn it to a dual layer DVD? is this correct?

I have 2 dmg disk one and disk two how do you merge these two. I see people have posted this question but no one has answered.

i burned it to a dual layer dvd, and its fine, but i cannot boot from it i double click install osx adn it comes up with reboot and i click reboot then it jsut starts up normally…not initializing the install procedure..!? :S

I have a iMAC G5 (PowerPC) running 10.4. I have the 10.5 Leopard .img on my only Hard Disk (the one with 10.4 on it), I can mount the .img and run the installer, it asks to reboot, then it just comes up as normal! Is it not possible to run the installer from the disk you want upgraded?

Thanks.

Just thought I would let you all know about how I was actually able to install Leopard….

I have an original 13″ MacBook (1.1) 1.83ghz, 2GB RAM, Dual Core INTEL

After numerous failed attempts at trying to install Leopard from either my DVD, an online rip or from an external HD/thumb drive… I found out that my RAM was the issue… not that there is anything actually *wrong* with it… but I added RAM a while back and because it’s third-party (not original) Leopard wouldn’t install… I kept getting the “Failed to Install” “Could not validate Essentials package”

The last things I did (that gave me a successful install) was that I created a partitian soley for restoring the Leopard image so that I could install it onto my main partitian. It restored fine and I was able to boot from it and begin installation… however, BEFORE I started this- I removed the extra 1GB RAM from the 2nd slot, selected Archive & Install (I had Tiger still on it) and it finally installed without a hitch.

Just thought I would share in case none of you have tried this method… because it’s not booting from an external that’s most likely the cause (as long as you’re using an INTEL MAC)… just remember to partitian your external USB HD/Flash/iPod using GUID just to be safe and make sure it’s at LEAST 8GB and do a RESTORE of the Leopard image directly onto that partitan using Disk Utility.

i like to install drive in disk dvdram drive

Hello all
I just bought the Leopard DVD and an external Firewire 800 HDD. I also want to keep my PB-G4 internal config OS X 10.3.9 untouched.

What I did was to drag the Leopard DVD onto the disk util box and the external HD onto the img box. It cOpied the whole DVD ONTO the external so it failed to boot from Leopard.

This is not incredibly easy IMHO. Would someone please tell me how to get the disk image of Leopard from the original DVD? THANKS.

Hi the dvd of my macbook is broken so I am trying to re-install the system to double check.

I used my 120G external harddriver and formatted one of the existing partition (i made the partition in windows long time ago and I am not sure if it is GUID or something else) for Mac, I restored the *.dmg to this partion smoothly.

As some of you addressed I can not find this external harddriver in the system profile->start up disk, but i did see it when I hold OPTION while rebooting, I choose this external hard driver and then it showed me the following:
” panic(cpu 0 caller 0×0042F4E3): “Unable to find driver for this platform: \ “ACPI”\”. \n”@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228/iokit/Kernel/ ”

I am not sure if this is because the partition is not GUID something, maybe it is better to make a fresh partition in disk utility…

Hi, ive been looking for this all over the web.
It works to a degree. But it doesnt install.
The problem i have is that i tried to reinstall Leopard as a brand new partition so it got rid of everything else, i found that it had an error etc and screwed up. So i have no OS on the internal drive now. I have another MacBook and have got my 20gb external hdd and put my OS X image and put it onto their by restoring it.
When i boot up on the macbook that doesnt have the OS on it boots but straight onto the operating system and not the installer. It seems like it transfers files from the external hdd to the macbook internal and stores them their until i reboot.
My question is. How do i boot the installer from the USB drive from the begining of boot?
Thanks

Ok i got it to boot now. I tried holding the Option button.
Thanks for the tutorial
Ill reply back soon with the verdict on installation.

I’ve got the same problem, i got the restore CD copied to my External hard drive, i choose to boot from there, and it comes up with the Panic cpu 0 caller. UNable to find driver for this platform.

I’m wondering if the CD of OSX I have is not a retail CD, but an image disk for a different type of machine.

I do the Restore to my External HDD and when i try to boot from that drive the screen does black (Blank) then restarts, i have a unibody macbook pro. if i try to open the installer app from mac os x leopard it says: the application “Install Mac OS X” Cannot be used from this volume. Please Someone Help!

@Mark

mine went white and then booted to the original OS. It never showed in the boot menu when holding option. I am having to reinstall my old OS X with a 10G partition for the Leopard install. I dont mind since there was nothing on it to begin with, it was a restore from a previous user. I will post if it works.

I got a powerbook g4 1 gig proscesser, 512 ram, panther 10.3.9 and i am having problems burning the .sparseimage and or .dmg files to dvd, buffer drained blah blah. so i used the restore method to put the leopard install info on my usb flash. i cant use the option in system setting to restart and install, so i restarted and used C key and boot option was there… i start the install process and get to the point of clicking install… then an error appears can’t find the files need to continue the install…. man that sucks what happened did i not get all the files i need into the spaseimage…??

Hello all,

I have got a error and I don’t get what the problem is.
Here is a link to show:
http://i43.tinypic.com/s1kbpj.png

The only thing I do on another way is, that I have an iso image that I mount with toast titanium.

Please could somebody help me.

Also I have the question if it is required that the partition have to be the first partition on the disk and if it is required that the disk is format as ”GUID Partion Table”

Thanks,

Joerian

hi im runnin tiger atm and ive followed these instrustions and used my external for the process. after it asks to reboot it restarts the mac but for some odd reason it reboots into tiger and nothin has changed. any advice on how to get this working?

hello every guys,

i have a problem, i do it the steps one by one, and finalize well. but when i’m trying to open the leopard installer from the external hard drive(FireWire) say a Error:

The application “Install Mac OS X” cannot
be used from this volume.

To install Mac OS X, please use the application
provided on the Mac OS X Installation Disc.

how i can get the install work?

Hi. I’ve read through the guide and alot of the comments troubleshooting but can’t find my problem listed.

Everything goes like it should but only until I want to retore it. When I push the button I get a message about a failure. “A failure was accounted (22) when copying” (I translate directly cause it’s in swedish.) I just want to know what the number 22 indicates so that I can continue troubleshooting.

spec: OS X 10.3.9 | PPC G5 dual 1.8 ghz | ext.drive: Freecom 160 gb (Firewire)

thx for help // Kali

Hi,

I have an Early 2008 MacBook Pro 2.5GHz that came with Leopard. The install consists of TWO dvd’s. I was able to use SuperDuper to “Backup” the DVD Install Disk 1 image to an 8GB partition on my external HD and run the install from that by booting from it BUT when it asked for the SECOND dvd I had to insert it in the DVD drive. I wold like to have the contents of BOTH the install DVDs on a single partion and be able to do the complete install from it. I se above that the question has been asked before, but I have not seen any answer. I believe tis can be done because there was what appeared to be an install partition on a drive they used at the Genius bar in the Apple Store.

@Kali-Mai

I was also getting a similar error but then realized where I screwed up. When you are choosing the file to place in the source you can drag the .dmg file but over on the right side it will say (mac something).dmg and then there will be a sub-heading MAC OSX Install DVD this is what you need to drag into the source file. When you do this and click restore it should work.

Cheers

Hi,

I’ve a ibook G3 600 mhz 640MB ram (mac os X 10.2.8) CD/DVD combo drive. I’m a novice to mac, so would instruction be working for me as well. or if i need to follow some other instruction please teel me. Thanks and i really appreciate your help.

Hey,

I was wondering if it would be possible to use this method to install this Mac OS on my Dell Latitude D630 as a dual boot without loosing any data… Thanks in advance!

Hello everyone,
Thanks a million for the great insight.
I just bought a used powerbook g4 with tiger installed.
The dvd drive is broken.
Will I be able to install using an external HD without having to use the dvd drive.
Thank you in advance for your help.

Hey i have a external hard drive formatted in GUID partition map and have the leopard dmg i have followed all ur steps and it even shows up in my start up disc …every thing is fine until the leopard installer pops up and say that mac osx cannot be installed on this computer

kindly help

thanks akshay

Thanks SaucE This method work for me too after trying all knds of method trying burning on a double layer disc did not work try resizing to single layer did not work and got to this site and this worked fine thanks guys for all the help

cool this method also worx for snow leopard

How many systems can the mac os x leopard retail be installed on?

I keep on getting this error on Disk Utility
“An error (16) occured while copying. (resource busy)”

I searched and used different solutions and it still doesn’t work.
I ejected the disk image. And still get the error. Am I not doing it right?

I can’t unmount the drive either, because if I do that, it wont restore.
What do I do?

I get the same error as Akshay Mehta saying mac osx cannot be installed on this computer.

I have a G4 PowerPC machine

I would be greatfull for any help.

Hello, I have followed your steps and everything but it does not seem to show up in my start up disk section. I am using a PowerPC G5. Also I have made a copy of Leopard on a DVD but the computer just spits it back out. When I put the DVD into my macbook it reads it just fine. what should i do?
thankssss

I have transferred the .DMG to a partition on an external FW hardrive, but I cannot get either my PPC G5 or my 867 dual G4 to start up from the external drive. It shows up fine, and it is there as an option if I go to ’startup disc’ in system preferences.

However, when either computer restarts, they go back to 10.4 Tiger on the normal boot drive.

When I restart holding down ‘option’ it only shows the original 10.4 startup option!

Any ideas gratefully recieved..

I’m having an issue with the last step in installing from my external hard drive. I went into System Preferences > Start up disk and Leopard was there in my external hard drive so I selected it and hit restart. However my computer has now restarted and there’s no further instructions.

I tried to go back to System Preferences and start up disk however the file is now gone and my hard drive is not connecting to my computer. I restarted my hard drive and the file showed up again under system preferences but again, when I hit restart, nothing.

Any advice?

Hello, I am having problems with “CheckSum” of my IMG file. Disk Utility says : Unable to verify!!! The MAX OS X is saved as .ISO
Is that problem cos I can open it from Tiger system but cant Restore it as the all 7.5 GB is in pale font and cant select it. Can You help.
Thanks

What if yu want to do this on a mac that has no os X on it and only have a Windows pc,Is there software to format a external hard drive or flash drive to osx????

Hi
I have OSX 10.5 as a .iso disk image. When I try the above process in step 5. it does not allow me to select the disk image in the “source” field.
Do I need to convert the .iso image to a .dmg somehow? If so, how?
Thanks

[…] Install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard With An External Hard Drive | Live Slick – […]

I’m not sure what all the fuss was about? Maybe others didn’t partition external correctly, or had glitchy systems?

Anyway…@Admin, your directions worked PERFECTLY, without one single hitch. Absolutely perfect install, did not have to modify anything, did absolutely nothing other than what Admin posted - just takes patience.

P.S. I have a macbook pro, purchased in 2008, and don’t know crap about computers. So this should be a no brainer for people who are more knowledgeable. You just have to read. All I had to do was make sure I partitioned the external hard drive and put the dmg’s separate from all my other stuff so I didn’t lose my personal info. (But I wouldn’t have had to anyway becasue I did the upgrade install (whish the system saw on it’s own), and everthing was still there with the new operating system.)

Cool stuff, and thank you so much for people like you who take the time to post these kinds of instructions, which apple didn’t see fit to do themselves (well they are trying to sell os’s anyway!)

Thanks so much!

Susanne

OMG, THAAAAANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS, YOU’RE MY HERO… I HAVE AN 07 MACBOOK PRO AND THE NVIDIA CARD GOT MESSED UP, SO I SENT IT TO REPAIR BUT I ONLY HAVE THE TIGER OS THAT MY COMPUTER CAME WITH AND NOW I UPGRADED FOLLOWING THE STEPS AND IT WORKS BRILLIANT, U SAVED ME $160 FOR THE MAC BOX SET, AND I HAVE IT ON MY EXTERNAL HD SAVED SO I CAN MAKE A COPY OF IT ON A CD THANKS AGAIN

Important first step left out: ERASE THE DRIVE AS MAC
I just used this method to upgrade a ppc with panther using a seagate
external 750 GB usb desktop hard drive. All the posts I have read said that you can only use fire wire but it worked!

1. Plug in your external hard drive
2. Open up Disk Utility
3. Click on the name of your external harddrive

In the left pane of the Disk Utility window, click the drive you want to erase.
In the right pane of the Disk Utility window, click the Erase tab.
From the Volume Format drop-down menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

4. Click on the “Restore” tab
5. In the “Source” field, select the image file (such as leopard.dmg) from wherever it is on your hard drive
6. In the “Destination” field, drag your external hard drive from the Disk Utility drive list on the left onto this field. Of course, if it’s only a partition on the external drive that you want to use, drag only the partition.
Note: anything on the partition will be erased and replaced with the installation files for Leopard. Therefore, it is best to make a partition on the external hard drive which has about 8 gigabytes. Use this partition as the destination so that everything else on the drive remains unchanged.
7. Click on restore. This may take awhile.
8. Once its done, open up System Preferences
9. Click on Startup Disk
10. Select the external hard drive (or partition in it) with the Leopard Install
11. Click Restart. The leopard installation will begin from the external hard drive. This installation is identical to installing leopard with a DVD.

Hi, ive got up to the stage where we have to select the start up disk. when i get to preferences, start up disk , my external hdd doesnt show up. this is really starting to grind my gears!

please help

hello. solution just make a new partition and restore the dmg leopard to the new one. wen finish go to system preferences select the startup on the new partition that should it. sorry i don’t know inglish.

Is it possible to “Upgrade” from 10.4 to 10.5 using this method?

The problem I run into is that once I select the partition to boot the 10.5 Upgrade dmg from the external, installation cannot find 10.4 startup disk which is on my internal HD.

I get an error stating that I must have 10.4 installed inorder to upgrade to 10.5 and it does not find 10.4 on my internal HD.

is there a solution to this?

The instructions worked flawlessly!! Thank you very much.

Hi Apple (August 30th 2009)

Try erasing the partition you are using to install Leopard on and make it a Mac OS Extended Journaled. That solved my same problem you are having.

do i have to partition the external or the new hard drive i want to install os x on? will partitioning a drive erase everything on it? i have an external…will that erase everything on it? am i partitioning my external or the internal?

ISSUE FOR POWERPC USERS SOLVED: Please Read

Hello. I have also had many issues with this and a PowerPC G4 computer. Once the image is put onto the external drive it will not show up in the system preferences but if you restart the computer with the external drive connected through USB and hold down the ‘alt/option’ key while the computer boots up it will bring you to a boot screen. It takes a few moments for it to load so wait a sec and then select your image and there you go! Hope this helps someone

Hi everyone,

I’m not sure if anyone will see this, given that it’s been awhile since the previous post. If possible, please help – it’s been giving me a serious headache for the past few days.

I’m using an iMac G5 PowerPC (last one prior to apple introducing Intel chips) without a working disc drive. OS 10.4.11

I used carbon copy clone to copy/restore the Mac OSX 10.5 dmg file onto an external firewire drive. I have selected it in the startup preferences to boot as startup. But, the problem is – it gives me a flashing folder with a question mark and the oldschool macOS face. Flashes for about 30 seconds to 1 minute and then starts up as it would normally.

Anyone with any thoughts on what I’m doing wrong? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

SaucE YOU`RE GOD IN PERSON!!!

To anonymous and other users getting that same “Restore Failure “An error (2) occurred while copying. (no such file or directory)” error. What I did was to format the USB drive (the “erase” tab in disk utility) and set it to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled).” After that, the repair task ran fine and the OS installed without incident.

I want to install mac os x leopard on my pc. May I ask where to download a torrent file a Full Version mac os x leopard?

This comments can help me install mac os x leopard on my pc for the first time. I hope someone can give a DL for mac os x leopard.

tnk u in advance guys…

Don’t know how to thank you and SaucE.

Really appreciate.

Ashish

after not going to sleep till 3 AM for two days i got my imac g5 to run leopard without the dvd

thanks alot to saucE: really good steps to follow…..and of course to mac administrator…..i just had trouble with partitioning my hard drive for some reason, so i had to reinstall the original panther os i already had….but after some research and reinstallation i came up victorious!!!

my computer is now in the process of installing leopard….

thx alot everyone

Can someone please help me, every-time I try to do this, it restores for a few minutes, and then stops with the message
“Restore Failure
An error (2) occurred while copying. (No such file or directory)”

Guynel had that problem, but the only solution is for error #16, not error #2; and it eventually worked for him.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Is it possible to do this but just when you boot up hold down ctrl or whatever the key is to choose the ext. drive as the boot drive

I followed the above directions accept my computer will not restart it will not get past the blue screen with the apple icon.

Thanks a lot for your post. This also works with Snow Leopard. I have been trying for 6 hrs to get a bootable copy, and it was this easy.

Perfect. Thanks saucE for the instruction, worked well!

Hi, I mounted it and everything got to the installer, then I get this “The Installer could not create the folder “/Volumes/Macintosh HD/BaseSystem.pkg.1631CVVky”. Any way around this? - thank you

Is cool I fixed it THank you all so much peace

i did the installation fine, but it is not booting from the hard drive. the hard drive is not listed in the startup disk option.

Brilliant. Thanks for posting.
For those of you who might not completely understand what this is about:
This is not about installing the os onto a flash drive or usb hdd and then running the os from the drive - but rather it is about installing the os onto a machine if, for example, your install DVD is damaged or your DVD drive is not working well enough to use it to install the os, but you can still make a .dmg image of the DVD on another machine.
If you want to take the .dmg and use it to install the os on an intel mac, you should be able to make a flash drive or usb drive bootable and then just boot the intel mac from it. However if have an older PPC (powerpc) machine this will not work, because ppc machines won’t recognize a usb drive, or anything plugged into the usb2 port, when booting.
So all this is telling us is that we can take an install DVD, run it only through the beginning on the machine we want to install the os on, so we get the menu at the very top. This menu allows us to run disc utility - run it .. and follow the steps to create a partition on the main hard drive on the same machine - your main hard drive must be partitioned, and all we’re here is creating two partitions instead of one, and making the second one only about 10 mb in size, for the purpose of then copying the bootable usb device onto … because every computer will always look at the main hard drive when it boots. This way, you will end up with one large partition, and another small one. The small one has the bootable installation dvd information on it.
Note that your main hard drive must be partitioned, and a brand new one is probably not. Also note that you will not definitely have to lose everything on the large partition; it depends on what your original partition map scheme was - in some cases you will be able to just add a partition without erasing the existing one.
After you’ve used the “restore” funtion in disc utility to copy the .dmg onto the new, small partition, you should be able to just close disc utility, power down, unplug the USB device, and restart, and the machine will FIND the bootable installation “disc” which is your smaller partition on the main hard drive.
This is not a question of whether you can install the os from the usb drive on a ppc machine. It is a good method to install the os when your dvd drive isn’t cutting it, or if you want to not use the dvd drive, or if you want to keep a copy of the installer package on your machine for future use.
It is particularly useful if you have a dvd that doesn’t complete the install because of some damage, but will spin ok in a newer drive on a different machine, which happens.

i Have an imac intel processor with a new hard drive, so, no system installed, i have snow leopard on my external USB hard drive. Can i do all steps on my running macbook and after force the imac with no system boot from the external hard drive.i don’t have fire wire cable and i want to avoid buying a double layer cd.
any idea if this is possible to do.

Thank you very much,
Duda.

Hi it worked!
Thanks for the guide i used it with my western digital external hard drive. BTW this method also worx for snow leopard

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Top-3-External-Hard-Drives-For-the-Year-2010-2011&id=5299474

If I set my partition as my startup disk, what happens if it is not there?
Will it just not start?

Trying to install Leopard onto my XLR8-upgraded G4 iMac (1.35 Ghz), but the installer refuses to let me. I’ve surmised that it can’t find the kernel extension to tell it the real speed of the machine, but even if I load it manually from Terminal in the Leopard installer, the installer will not run.

So, either I’m giving it the wrong path to the installer in Terminal, or something else is wrong that I can’t figure out. Trying other solutions such as Leopard Assist to fool the firmware doesn’t work, either.

I’d like to be able to install it from a USB stick, or my external backup drive, but am not sure if the solution presented here will work, or is worth the time to test it?

Ideas? Solutions?

After all these years, this method still works. Great post, thanks a MILLION!

I’m writing this comment from my new leopard os! thanks to saucE and a few tricks!

1.42 PPC gHz procesor, did not need firewire! what i did was had the leopard.dmg on my external hard drive, inserted tiger install cd, partitioned internal hard disk into 10/rest. then i continued installing tiger. once fully reinstalled tiger, i placed the leopard.dmg in the bigger partition, and continued on with saucE’s instructions on booting from that partition as if it was a firewire drive!

FOLLOW IF YOU HAVE PPC BUT NO FIREWIRE EXTERNAL! WORKED!

Hi I have installed the dmg onto a external hard drive following your steps. When i restart my mac book and select the external drive its just hangs on the grey screen with the apple logo…Please help.

For me the solution to my problem was finally given to me by ZIggy and his neat post, posted March 19th, 2011

Its a cool sum-up of the whole comment chaos in here. I couldn’t see my usb flash drive in the “startup disc” thingy, dumped the idea, went for a partition in my main HDD, dumped my Leo DMG in it and problem soved.

Thanx ZIggy!A+

can this also be done with the hard rive inside your computer

AWESOME!!! I wish I would’ve found this a LONG time ago…I have scoured the net, and racked my brain trying to get my G5 to boot 10.5
Awesome, thank you guys!

Does work…just read instructions and follow to the “T”

Lost original startup disc that came with my 2006 2.16GHz MacBook Pro but had to replace the dead hard drive and therefore the OS. Used this technique with a disc image got from the University that I work at loaded onto a free partition in my external HD. Worked great!

One snag I had as a novice was that I couldn’t select the ‘Mac OS X install application’ in the browser that shows up if you click on the image button in the Disc Utility>Restore tab. Realized you have to actually drag the mounted OS X disc image from the sidebar- i.e. don’t use the image button at all- then it worked great. Thanks for the help!

You are the best! Thank You a lots!

This was a solid waste of time.

I don’t have the Tiger disk.

I cannot find my snow leopard discs. I want to put in a larger hd and then use the install disc for my new drive and and then back up from time machine to my new drive. Will this work?

I have been following developments with Hard drives and OS X,
I have been playing around with my Macbook pro mid 2010
and I have found that just make a back up and then go ahead
read these posts for advice and direction as a maybe you can do it this way .
I have installed and run snow leopard from a usb hard drive with no probe and one partition formatted for mac I just plugged in the drive and put the disc in the mac run start up and install , then I chose the usb drive then installed it strait on the drive
I can boot up in snow leopard from power up or start up disc , all pluged drives show up ,,,,,,, and I can access all data on it like a portable hard drive and vis versa in Finder I can even boot up a windows machine with iboot and empire efi
but not all pc work with this . hope this helps

I seem to be having problems.. I have the mac os x leopard dmg file on my flash drive. It restores and all and then I go to the Start Up section in disk utilites and when i press restart It doesnt restart. PLEASE HELP

Crazy good! 4 years later and your help is still good.
I too had an issue, it would not restart from external HD until I copied install dmg from external HD to target HD, then erased external HD with disk utility and followed your instructions to a T. Thank you.

PS: I used an external HD with FireWire to PowerBook G4 (updating my friends old beauty).

Hi

Thank you so much for the thread.. It worked perfectly for me !

I had Powerpc G5. Lost my OS in an attempt to dual boot with Ubuntu. Wanted to restore Mac 10.5 .. Had a hel lot of time as my powerpc had no dual layer DVD reader ! Finally got an old external hard disk from friend. But then while trying to restore the image OS to disk it was not detecting …

Finally got the solution by renaming it from .iso to .dmg.

Then everything went perfectly well …

Thanks again

So I have a G4 iMac with 16 GB SSD, copying the Leopard iso to a Firewire hd doesn’t work for me. After selecting it as startup disk it boot’s into the 10.4 installation anyway. And booting from the 10.4 dvd won’t let me select the Leopard iso, seems like only dmg’s are selectable. I can however partition the SSD in half, install 10.4, and unlike the 10.4 dvd, the installation lets me select the iso and get a bootable Leopard install partition. The problem is, the other partition is so small I can’t upgrade to 10.5.8 after installing as it requires 5-6GB free space.
Any suggestions?

Hi
I have a powerbook G4, and of course this doesn’t work for me, because G4-s can’t boot from a usb drive. My laptop is full of stuff, so I can’t repartition it, and it doesn’t let me split the existing partition. So it sucks, I have to buy the dvd. I’ve found used ones, and I can resell them after I installed it..

My problem is that I have a PowerBook g4 with a broken cd drive, it just will not read anything. I have tried booting with a usb drive and there is no way this is working. SaucE method would work if my drive worked. Besides buying a firewire drive is there anyway to reinstall 10.5?

Thank you so much in advance.

Thanks a million for the tutorial! I’ve been trying to figure this whole process out for nearly a year!

I purchased my machine from ebay,(powermacG5 dual 1.8) with no start up discs(running Tiger) and couldn’t get my FCP plugins to function properly. I read a few articles where people where having the same problem and upgrading to Leopard was the consensus. A friend gave me the Leopard install disc and the combo drive wouldn’t read it. So I purchased an external drive and couldn’t get it to boot. SOOOOOO let down!

Long story short:

Leopard is installing now!

You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Don’t let anyone ever tell you any different.

Ok so this helped a lot, I was trying to install snow leopard on a 2006 macbook pro 15.4 because my mac hd had failed and would not boot, so I had to format and re-install, lost the original disc. got a disc 10.6.whatever that came with my brothers new 13 mac pro 2011, and of course got the cannot install on this mac message while trying to install.

Anyway like suggested I used the snow disc to get to disc utility menu, got a hold of a 10.5 leopard .iso install file, used a partition on an external hard drive and turned that into a mac cd installation drive (using your instructions) but then even though it showed up as a boot disc when choosing disk to boot and restart off of, it would not actually come up when the comp restarted.

So playing on your idea, I partitioned the internal clean mac HD, made it into 2 partitions 1 and 2, used the completed external drive partition in restore as the source and turned internal partition 2 into the mac 10.5 install drive. then shutdown comp, unplugged external, eject cd (using hold down both track pad buttons method) and while booting up, partition 2 internal booted up the install 10.5 process and gave me the option to install on internal partition 1 therefore fixing all my issues and re-installing a fresh osx on a clean drive, granted ill have to delete the extra partition, but after 5 hours and a lot of failure this finally worked for me, and even though I’m basically vomiting this out of my brain, it might hopefully help someone who did all of the stuff above you guys came up with, but still could not get the install to boot off of the external drive.

Thanks again and sorry my excitement at getting this to work, refuses to make this an easy read.