Leopard Firewire Target Mode OS Install
Posted in Leopard, Mac OS X, System Administration on 11/04/2007 02:17 pm by jmccune
The DVD drive on my desktop Mac is broken, making it difficult to install the operating system. I wanted to put Leopard on this machine today, so I tried installing to the machine from my MacBook Pro.
Since Leopard is now Universal for both PowerPC and Intel, this ended up working nicely. The one note, however, is that installer will complain about the partition table when it’s executing on an intel machine, but installing to a PowerPC disk. The installer thinks it’ll be booting from the drive, so it doesn’t like the Apple Partition Map, demanding a GPT table instead.
The solution is to set the CM_BUILD variable, allowing installation to the target disk.
export CM_BUILD=CM_BUILD
export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1
export SRC="/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD"
installer -verbose \
-pkg "$SRC"/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg \
-target "/Volumes/Macintosh HD 1/" \
-lang en | tee /tmp/installer.log
11/05/2007 at 4:08 pm
[...] il classico post che può salvarvi la giornata: come installare Leopard da CLI su una macchina avviata in target [...]
11/16/2007 at 10:59 am
Thanks! I’m having the same problem of having a broken DVD drive. I have an external drive, but I can’t get Leopard to boot from it. I have an Intel MacBook, so this little trick ought to work.
11/23/2007 at 8:35 pm
Didn’t work for me I’m afraid - trying from a MacBook Pro to an 800Mhz iBook I got…
export CM_BUILD=CM_BUILD
export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1
export SRC=”/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD”
sudo installer -verbose -pkg “$SRC”/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg -target /Volumes/ibook/ -lang en | tee /tmp/installer.log
installer: Cannot install on volume /Volumes/ibook because it is disabled.
installer: To enable installation on this volume open Disk Utility from the Utilities menu and repartition this disk as ‘GUID Partition Table’. Note: you will lose all data on this disk by repartitioning it.
11/24/2007 at 9:01 am
I have tried to use these steps to install Leopard on an unsupported iMac 700 GHz using my MacBook, but I still get an error message telling me that the target volume is disabled and that I need to repartition the volume as a GUID Partition Table.
Since there is no difference between using or not using the three environment variables, I was wondering what I might be missing?
12/06/2007 at 2:34 pm
I apologize for the very long delay replying to these comments. I just recently setup Akismet to help with the comment spam I’ve been getting.
In any event, I’m not entirely sure how to handle the situation where a new, intel machine is being used to install Leopard to a PowerPC machine’s disk drive in firewire target mode.
This situation is problematic because the two systems use very different partition tables. I don’t believe a PowerPC machine is able to boot a GUID partition table.
One thing you might try doing…
Create a sparse disk image with a GUID partition table in the disk image, then mount the HFS+J volume you create in the image.
Install Leopard as per my instructions above, to the volume in the Disk image.
Then, use rsync -avxHE in order to copy the entire contents of the Leopard system out of the disk image onto your Apple Partition Map disk volume.
Option+Boot your PowerPC Mac, and it should see the Leopard volume.
12/22/2007 at 2:26 pm
I ended up creating a patched duplicate of the original Leopard DVD on which the CPU speed restriction has been removed from the installer. Another method is increasing the CPU speed meet the CPU speed requirement.
See http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=371302 for a description of both methods.
05/17/2008 at 10:47 pm
Since upgrading to Leopard on my G5 iMac I get an extremely slow boot-up via a blue screen and it no longer recognises my FW400 ports.
There seems to be a general Leopard FW problem with older Macs as reported on several websites including Apple’s own discussions.
What is annoying is that this is the 2nd time Apple has introduced serious Firewire problems with a system upgrade, the last time was with OSX 10.3.
FireWire is Apple’s technology, they should be able to handle it better. USB which is not their’s seems to be unblemished!
09/06/2008 at 9:40 pm
I have a refurbed I mac silver model and the damn thing wont recognize my Canon firewire camcorder when I also plug in a firewire drive needed for the scratch disk with Final Cut. I even reset the pram or nvram and it won’t see the camcorder at all, with or without anything else plugged into the firewire port.
I bought the Mac and Final Cut for this reason (to edit) and the damn thing just won’t see my camera. This is incredibly poor performance for what is supposed to be one of the reasons to buy a mac to begin with. BAD,BAD,BAD. The second time I’ve had a Mac with these problems.