Hackintosh Must Have: Mac OS X Installer USB Hard Drive

In ways it’s like your perfect pair of denim jeans and even more valuable at times. I’m speaking specially of those times when you’ve rendered your internal drive, and by consequence your Mini, no longer bootable because of the various “experiments” (though pointless they may often be) that you’ve done in pursuit of geek nirvana.

You could try getting a boot-132 CD for Retail/Vanilla install (this one is also for use with Vanilla install) but I prefer installation via bootable usb hard drive because it’s faster because with the numerous wipe-out and reinstall that I constantly do for those “experiments” (but actually more in pursuit of relieving boredom from lack of a social life rather than geek nirvana), every minute and second saved from DVD disc spinning inside an external optical drive do add up considerably.

So here are the ingredients:

• NetbookBootMaker 0.8.3
• External USB Hard Drive “USB HDD” (8 gigs or more) – I don’t own a USB flash drive with this much capacity so I don’t really know if it would work, but you can always try.
• Snow Leopard Retail DVD image (.dmg, .cdr, .ISO)
• Real Mac or a working Hackintosh

Plat de Résistence – Cooking Procedure :

1) With the USB HDD plugged to your Mac or hackintosh, launch Disk Utility. Click to highlight the usb hdd then click on the Partition tab to format the drive. Either use GUID or MBR. Click on OK.

2) Select partition format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and type in a name for the usb hdd; “SnowDVD” for example. Click on the Apply button at the bottom right.

3) Still in Disk Utility, click on a volume from the list at the left pane. This will show a Restore tab an the right pane. Click on Restore tab.

4) From the list at the left pane, select and drag the “Snow Leopard Retail DVD” volume to the field labeled “Source” at the right pane.
*If the image or volume isn’t shown in the list, locate it in Finder and drag it there to add it to the list.

5) Again from the list at the left pane, drag the volume “SnowDVD” to the field labeled “Destination” at the right pane. Click on the Restore button. This will take some time; wait until Disk Utility completes restoring the Snow Leopard Retail DVD image to the “SnowDVD” volume. Quit Disk Utility.

6) Launch NetbookBootMaker. Select “SnowDVD” volume from the “Select USB Partition” drop down menu. Click on the “Prepare Boot Drive”. Wait till it completes loading the needed files. Quit NetbookBootMaker.

7) In Finder, Cmd+Shift+G and type in the path /Volumes/SnowDVD/System/Installation/Packages in the dialogue sheet. Press Enter.

You now have a working Mac OS X Installer USB HDD which you can already use.

However, if you want to customize it for the HP Mini 1000; i.e. functional audio right away via VoodooHDA, correct power management, MacBook Air smbios etc. (for when you wanna use this drive as a handy external booter in the future) you can continue with these next additional steps.


Voodoo Moose & That Jazz – Dessert:

1) Download this .zip file “additional” and unzip it to a location in your drive.

2) In Finder, Cmd+Shift+G to go to /Volumes/SnowDVD/Extra/.

3) Copy the files, all 4 of them, included in the .zip file you just downloaded: 2 folders “GeneralExtensions” and “Themes” and 2 files (.plists) “com.apple.Boot.plist” and “smbios.plist”. Paste them inside /Volumes/SnowDVD/Extra/.

4) Launch the UpdateExtra app found in /Volumes/SnowDVD/Extra/.

Click on the “UpdateExtensions”button. Wait until it finishes updating your Extra folder. You’ll know it’s done when the button is no longer recessed.

Bon appétit!