[HOWTO] - Make a Mac OS X Utilities Boot CD

Its old thread, but this is now retro Gaming and i need to make something with my G5 iMac 10.4.

In text above is that you could make Boot CD with Carbon copy, i checked whole Carbon copy menu, but i dont see such option here. So its wrong information, or how to do it?
 
I do understand why you pulled up a 15 year old thread. But rereading the all of the posts, I only found step by step using Disk Utility. What option are you looking for in Carbon Copy Cloner?
 
I just need make Carbon Copy bootCD if it is possible, someone claimed that is possible.
It would help to avoid annoying iMac replacing original and target disc inside iMac few times during disk cloning process, especially when you are cloning Linux partition too or disk with different size. I managed it, but its complicated process.

So far, i checked these tools for PPC Mac (10.4, maybe its last one with ClassicOS), maybe there are others.
iPartition - 3.3.1, 3.4.5 is not working on 10.4, can created partition on disk with Linux, its better than Disk Utility, but there are not partition clone option. Maybe bootable disk made on newer 10.5 with 3.4.5 would still work on G5 and it has more features.
Live Linux disc with Gparted for Linux partition cloning and you need to for yaboot.conf editing to adjust it to new disc. You need also place boot flag on Bootstrap partition,otherwise yaboot is complaining about wrong filesystem.
Carbon copy / Super Dumper - good for copy MacOS to need disk.

BootCD claims to work only 10.3, but again if you have access to older Mac if 10.3, you probably can make boot disk, which would be working with G5 Mac.
 
I suggest that the easiest way to do this is to make your bootable backup on an external hard drive in a Firewire enclosure (more reliable booting from a Firewire drive, compared to USB, which can be challenging.)
That means that you need to have one of those (an external Firewire drive.)
And, unless you do already have a Firewire drive, the choices for those are disappearing quickly.
 
Hmm, thanks Carbon copy is warning me that USB will not boot, so aware of it and its just feature, so Fireware would be ok, it would help with some swapping but problem is mainly about cloning and partitioning tools.
 
I guess you are wanting a multi-boot drive, with separate partitions for each OS?
Which OS do you want to have on your external boot drive?
 
Only MacOS + Linux, i know that you have multiple MacOS version, but its not my thing.. I also dont expect miracles and edit of Linux boot loader files with right ids.. But something like resize of MacOS parition when its migrated on smaller disk would be nice, or increase size of MacOS partition without data loss would be nice too, Gparted seems to have only shrink options.

I also tried some PC tools, but Apple Partition scheme is problem, so far only R-Drive image can make disk image, but it could be returned only to disk with exact same size, so if disk dies its problematic. Even make MacOS partition bootable is problem - iPartition failing with that.. i had to install clean install and after than replace data with Carbon Copy.
 
Best way to do that is to begin with the partitions as the size that you want. After that, you would need to rely on where in the partition scheme your chosen partition to resize happens to be... a first partition, with others following, usually does not allow partition re-sizing, particularly larger. I think it is a design limitation of the macos extended format that used to be the standard Mac format (and is more challenging in some ways with the newer APFS format that Apple uses now, although there are other options that makes resizing less necessary for most uses.)
And, Linux + OS X really relies on how you set up the partitions with whatever bootloader you use with your Linux install.
I think what has worked for me in that past (when I tried Linux a few times, just for fun), is to make your partitions first. Leave the Mac partition alone for now. Install Linux, get that working. Then, install OS X, and set up what you need. Do a quick check to see that the Linux boots and works OK.
Keep in mind that I haven't used Linux, nor installed on anything since about 5 years ago. Just remember what worked for me. I might have been over-thinking that, but I could use both OSes, plus, I had a Windows 10 install at that time, so a 3-way split. As I recall, I was not very successful when trying to boot between all 3 OSes. I had to do a lot of tweaking. Ah, it was just a hobby for me, and nothing too critical.

My main plan these days is, as you seem to know, having multiple Mac systems on one drive. The one that I use commonly has 12 bootable Mac system installers (all different), plus 2 archive partitions, and 3 other partitions with actual full system installs, all bootable. No "foreign" stuff like Windows or Linux, all Mac. I do lots of service and system reinstalls on a wide range of Macs. Nice to have everything I typically might use during the day all on one drive. It's also not a hard drive, but a PCIe m.2 external 500GB SSD. Much smaller than drives I was typically using beyond a couple of years ago.
 
It's been a hobby of mine, packing more partitions on a drive. And, it became useful since Lion, with Apple making it fairly simple to make a bootable installer, without having to copy from a DVD first. I used to try to make the installer partitions as small as possible, but then Apple started making the installers much larger. It's still very nice to simply plug in one small external SSD, not much larger than a thumb drive, and be able to boot and install Leopard on a 2006 Mac, or, with the same drive, boot and install Big Sur (or Monterey beta) on a brand new M1 mini. It's -- just a hobby (that consumes a lot of time - like any good hobby :D )
 
Back
Top