How to: Install to a MBR drive from a unmodified vanilla osx dvd

[Fredde87]

Hi there,

 

Please be patient with me as this is my first How To... I came across the same issue other people have had where they want to dual boot OS X with Windows and already have a MBR hard drive with Windows on that they can not repartition as GPT (which is required by the installer).

 

First off all I want to thank llauqsd for creating this guide (http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=116505) on how to modify a retail DVD in order to accomplish the same goal.

 

Unfortunately you need access to a mac in order to follow this guide, which I did not. Here is how I got around it. Please note my way requires a separate spare 5gb partition. This can be on any drive (even a USB stick), or if you already have Vista then you could temporarily shrink it by 5gb, create a new partition on it and then after the installation delete it and expand the vista partition back to its original size.

 

 

Here we go,

 

1. Boot the retail DVD using boot 132

2. Open the Disk Utility and format the spare 5gb partition. I used Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but it shouldn't matter. Lets name it TempPart in this guide

3. Now open a terminal window

4. Type the following,

cp -R /System/Installation/Packages/* /Volumes/TempPart

(obviously replace TempPart with your partition). This copy will take a while to finish, but it will also massive speed up the actual installation later on so it will take you around the same time as a normal install anyway.

5. Type the following to change into this directory,

cd /Volumes/TempPart

6. Lets create a temp folder to work in,

mkdir temp

7. We need to copy OSInstall.mpkg which we are going to modify,

mv OSInstall.mpkg temp/

8. Lets move into it our temp folder,

cd temp

9. Lets extract the OSInstall.mpkg,

xar -x -f OSInstall.mpkg

10. Lets remove the GPT check,

cat Distribution | sed "s/eraseOptionAvailable='true'//g" > Distribution2

(Please note the difference between single and double quotes above!

11. Lets replace the old file with our new one,

mv Distribution2 Distribution

12. Lets delete our original OSInstall.mpkg so that we can create a new one,

rm -Rf OSInstall.mpkg

13. Lets pack it all up again,

xar -c -f OSInstall.mpkg *

14. Lets move it pack with the rest of the packages,

mv OSInstall.mpkg ../

15. Lets go up a directory,

cd ..

16. Lets delete the temp folder,

rm -Rf temp

17. Now we need to find out what the actual path is to this directory. Type the following command,

mount

and look for the /Volumes/TempPart in the list. Note down the disk and partition it is on, you are looking for something like this /dev/disk0s3

18. Lets go out of this folder so that we can unmount it,

cd /

19. Lets unmount it,

umount /Volumes/TempPart

20. Lets remount it but in the /System/Installation/Packages folder to trick the installer to read/install the packages from our partition rather then our cd. Remember the replace my example with the disk address you noted down in step 17.

mount -t hfs /dev/disk0s3 /System/Installation/Packages

21. Exit out of the terminal now. Then click back in the installation wizard all the way to the beginning again where you choose the language. It will now reload the OSInstall.mpkg file which we have now modified to allow MBR installations. If everything has gone well then it should now allow you to install to your MBR partition. If not then you will probably get a error message when you select the language.

 

I have written these instructions from the top of my head, hopefully I didnt get any typos in there but if anyone has any problems or can see something wrong in my instructions then please let me know.

[TheAlchemyFreak]

Hey, so I still am not getting any luck with this guide. I had previously followed a guide that restored the retail dvd image to an external hard drive and installed chameleon rc2 on it, so I tried to carry that over with this guide. The external drive I'm using is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the partition with the restored image on it is Mac OS Extended, and I followed this guide to the T, and it's just not working. When I go back to reload the OSInstall.mpkg, the installer fails, it gives me some message that says something like 'failed to prepare the installer.' Before, I had my TempPart as Mac OS Extended, and the installer would load up fine, but it would say "Mac OS cannot start up on this disk."

I'm just not having any luck with this. Any suggestions?

[Michael Jackson]

I was about to try this with 10.6 install USB stick.

There's an easier way.

 

http://www.kexts.com/view/224-osinstall_fr...r_installs.html

 

Will provide you with necessary file to copy to USB stick. 1 small file, no need to do anything else than copy it on usb drive at right location. Command line copy is one single command and that's it. No need for a third TempPart. Also has attached installation instruction wich are something like:

 

sudo cp OSInstall /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Install.framework/Frameworks/OSInstall.framework/Versions/A/

 

Must be run at downloaded (and extracted) file location.