Making a bootable Tiger DVD

Question

Making a bootable Tiger DVD

Hi,

I have said I'd investigate this for someone thinking it would be relatively straight-forward, but after a few unsuccessful attempts, it appears not. Here's the story so far:

I installed a minimal Tiger System on a small partition on an external firewire drive. It weighed in at around 2.5Gb. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.

I then made a cdr disk image of that with Disk Utility specifying CD/DVD master.

I then burned that to a DVD. The DVD was shown as a bootable option in System Prefs>Startup disk.

It does start to boot, but takes a long time on the Grey Apple screen & then dumps into the Darwin console & complains about the USB I/O system not being able to enumerate a device.

The boot process never completes, cycling between the Darwin console (& many occurrences of the error mentioned) & a blank desktop.

Am I close to doing this? Is it possible? I have read elsewhere that only special hacks can get this to work as the startup volume normally has to be writeable. Are there ways around this? I know ppl say to just use my external firewire drive (& I do), but I want the extra flexibility a boot DVD would afford (eg on the road).

T.I.A

GAM

Mac mini 1.42GHz PPC Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Posted on May 15, 2006 5:20 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

May 15, 2006 6:43 PM in response to Glen Mcallister

There is only one way to make a bootable DVD of Tiger and that is to make a duplicate of the Tiger DVD. Although it would seem straight forward making a bootable DVD/CD is a challenge. Optical discs are not writeable devices, hence when you try to boot and the OS tries to write to the startup device, it cannot. Hence, no bootup. There are ways around this but it requires hacking the installed system in numerous places, creating a RAM disk and copying certain files to the RAM disk and changing some of the startup scripts to force the system to write its output to the RAM disk instead of to the startup device. Although this was easier to do with older versions of the OS, it's been a major challenge with Tiger. Thus there is currently no way to do it.

If you want to make a bootable CD with Panther on it, you can do that using a freeware utility called BootCD (www.versiontracker.com.)

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Answer 2

a brody

Level 10

85,314 points

May 16, 2006 6:40 AM in response to Glen Mcallister

I would suggest, if you need the extra flexibility for the road, to get a portable hard drive like one of the ones offered by http://www.macsales.com/ with built-in Firewire. One of the older Firewire bootable iPods can also suffice as well as some of the Smartdrives. The 5th generation iPod won't do Firewire.

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Answer 3

May 16, 2006 4:02 PM in response to Glen Mcallister

I'm close to accepting this can't be done. Just thought I'd quote from Disk Utility in Tiger before I close this issue...

------------------------ start ---------------------------

"You can create CD or DVD that you can use as a startup disk, by creating a disk image of a disk or volume that can start up your computer, and then copying that image to a CD or DVD.

Select the disk to copy it in the list of disks and volumes.
Choose File > New > "Disk Image from (name of volume)."
Type a name for the disk image
Choose "DVD/CD master" from the Image Format pop-up menu.
Click Save.
When creating the disk image finishes, eject the original CD or DVD.
Select the disk image in the list and choose Images > Burn.
When the Burn Disc dialog appears, insert a blank CD or DVD, and click Burn."

------------------------ end ---------------------------

Comments?

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Answer 4

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

May 16, 2006 4:52 PM in response to Glen Mcallister

The statement means you can make a bootable disc by making a copy of another bootable disc such as the one that comes with the computer or one that you've purchased. It does not mean you can simply make your own bootable disc starting from scratch.

Again, please read my first post.

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Answer 5

May 16, 2006 5:18 PM in response to Kappy

Kappy - I did read & understood your original post - I just couldn't reconcile it to the help article, until now when I see the instruction:

"When creating the disk image finishes, eject the original CD or DVD."

So, just a bit of misleading terminology at the start of the article (especially use of 'disk' & 'volume') to mislead me into thinking it was possible.

Thanks - I'll close & award points now.

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Answer 6

Abe

Level 3

910 points

May 16, 2006 6:20 PM in response to Kappy

I've heard many posters on this forum say that they make a .dmg files of their Mac OS X Install Disks. I guess they use Disk Utility, SuperDuper! etc.

It is my understanding though that if you burn the .dmg file you still can't boot from that DVD. Is this right?

So I'm guessing the only way that one could make a copy of their DVD and have it boot would be to have a Mac with two DVD drives (or one internal and one external) and find a program that would copy bit by bit of data from one to the other?

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Answer 7

May 16, 2006 6:34 PM in response to Abe

...
It is my understanding though that if you burn the
.dmg file you still can't boot from that DVD. Is
this right?
...

You have to burn a .cdr (DVD/CD master) image to a blank DVD to make a bootable DVD. If your friends have been trying to burn .dmg images (which may be compressed) this could be why they aren't working. By following the instructions in my earlier post (from Disk Utility) a bootable DVD (copy) can be made with only one DVD drive.

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Answer 8

John Child

Level 4

1,349 points

May 16, 2006 8:46 PM in response to Abe

Hey Abe,

Disk Utility is all you need. Make a .dmg file from, for example, the system DVD that came with your computer.

Run Disk Utility
Insert DVD
File > New > Disk Image from Folder
Select the system DVD and click the Image buttom
Choose a name and location for the .dmg file and click Save

To make a duplicate bootable system DVD, burn the image.

Run Disk Utility
File > Open Disk Image
Select your .dmg file and Open
Disk images are listed underneath physical volumes to the left
Select the .dmg file (not the volume listed underneath it)
Click the Burn button at the top left of the window

Voila! No special options are needed; a plain .dmg file works fine. This will even duplicate "foreign" disks like Windows install DVDs.

Good luck.

John

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