Comments on: Install Snow Leopard from External Firewire or USB Hard Drive: How to Upgrade to Mac OS X 10.6 Without a DVD Drive

By: Brad

Brad — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:01:01 +0000

A solution without an external USB drive to partition. Requires you doing a fresh install at some point of Tiger or Leopard before updating to Snow Leopard. I happened to have just done a fresh install a few weeks ago.
It requires partitioning a small portion of the Mac hardrive so you have a 10 GB partition setup as explained in the above tutorial. Then after you have created a DMG of Snow Leopard and have it saved to anywhere(desktop) is what I do. In disk utility on restore just set the dmg as source and drag your new 10gb partition as destination.

My MacBook optical is broke but this has always worked for me.

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:20:12 +0000

Hi, i followed all the step but when i got to the step when i have to reboot and press the alt/option button and select the startup disk, i selected the snow leopard drive but it then went back to my original one

By: chan

chan — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 08:57:28 +0000

this happened to me too with a restart and a blank screen. anyone figure it out? i have my dmg file on a USB junk drive if that helps solve the problem.

i was able to start the install from the USB drive instead of restarting and holding the apple button (when i did it after the restart i was never prompted with a list that included the USB drive, only the mac HD)

By: Janusz

Janusz — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 08:20:04 +0000

I ran in to the same problem, but when attempting to Scan for restore, I got the following message:

“Unable to scan “Mac OS X Install DVD.cdr.” (invalid argument)

?????

By: Alder Knight

Alder Knight — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 19:32:24 +0000

Thank you! This is exactly the issue I was having, perfect.

By: wooo

wooo — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:04:36 +0000

Ipods will not be recognized by your mac as a hard drive on boot. ever

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Computer OSX LION usb stick - 9lives - Games Forum — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:44:42 +0000

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By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:01:28 +0000

mmiikkee,

On Intel Macs it is possible to boot from the disk image of Snow Leopard Installer. If the disk image is on an external drive and you launch the installer app within the disk image, then your Mac will attempt to boot from the disk image. Therefore it is not necessary to clone the contents of the Leopard Installer disk image to another drive and run from that.

If you found that your disk image will not boot then perhaps it’s not authentic, perhaps someone tried to download it via windows or use another image tool to create it.

I have an ‘authentic’ Snow Leopard disc, an Intel MBP and made a disk image on an exterior drive but when I click the installer it tells me I cannot install from the exterior drive and need to install from a DVD so this all does not seem to work. The disc has not been re-formatted.

By: fredisazombie

fredisazombie — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:41:05 +0000

so i tried this, but i ran into a snag. when i try to reboot the mac and select the external drive from the ‘boot loader’, no such external hard drive appears for me to select. i figured this wasn’t such a big deal and tried to install from the external drive icon on my desktop. everything was going swimmingly, but when the installation restarts my computer, it never starts again. i think this is because the external drive shuts off communication with the computer when the computer powers down and forgets that it needs to resume an installation. any ideas? thanks

By: Derp

Derp — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 18:45:26 +0000

Yes – everyone will get this error without this step. Please update the tutorial if you can since this is one of the top hits on google on how to do this.

Thanks!

By: Julia

Julia — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 05:31:12 +0000

Just curious, but would you need to completely erase other data from the external hard drive or usb before using it to install the operating system? Or is it okay if I leave my other files on the external hard drive, will it still install my OS as per the instructions above? I have a macbook air.

By: Ton Haarmans

Ton Haarmans — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 23:24:37 +0000

This method worked nice with Mac OS X 10.6.8.

But with Lion, Mac OS X 10.7 it does not work:

Restore Failure
Could not restore- Resource busy

By: Marcus

Marcus — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:42:39 +0000

When I hold down the option key, it doesn’t work!
I’ve tried about 50 times!

By: Wheat Williams

Wheat Williams — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 03:09:40 +0000

I’ll correct that. My actual time turned out to be one hour and twenty minutes.

By: Wheat Williams

Wheat Williams — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 02:51:50 +0000

I’ve found this post helpful, but one crucial thing was missing from your writeup: how much TIME will this procedure take?

“Click OK and wait for the image to be created” is not a useful or quantifiable piece of information. How long should you expect to wait?

“Restoring” the physical DVD directly to the USB drive takes TWO HOURS AND FIFTEEN MINUTES. I think you should have mentioned that in your initial post.