Cloning your Leopard Install DVD
My Leopard Install DVD has been acting up lately. I have a Leopard family pack and I had only used three of its five licenses. I was in a party with a friend and I had offered him that I will upgrade his Tiger OS to Leopard. He brought his Macbook; I brought my install DVD. Several hours later and several beers later, his Macbook was still reading the DVD.
There are several other reasons why you should backup and archive your install DVD. Performing a full disk restore using Time Machine requires that you boot up using the installation DVD. Running a disk repair also requires the installation DVD. Of all the devices on a computer, the optical disk drive is one that is most prone to breaking down. The DVD is also prone to damage. Losing either one of these critical pieces at a critical point in time will definitely make your eyes water. An external hard disk is definitely more reliable.
Preparation: You will need your Leopard install DVD and an external hard drive. The external hard drive needs about 10 GB to store the bootable disk image. The hard drive can be one single partition or it can have multiple partitions. It does not really matter. I created a dual partition external drive—one 15 GB for the bootable Leopard DVD image, the rest for Time Machine.
Step 1: With your Leopard installation DVD loaded, open up Disk Utility.
You should see the Mac OS X Install DVD at the left sidebar. Select it and then click on New Image.
You can save the disk image anywhere. Take note of the file name (in my case, it was Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg). I chose to save to the Desktop just so that it will be easy to locate.Now grab a sandwich or take a nap. It takes about an hour to create the disk image.
Step 2: Launch Disk Utility once more and select the Restore tab.Source should be the disk image that you created. In my case, it was Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg located on my desktop. Destination should be the partition on your external hard drive.
Now to test. With the external drive connected, boot up your Mac. Hold down the Option key as you are booting and you will be presented with your startup disk options. Your external drive should be visible. Select your external drive as your startup device and you are good to go!
March 09 2008 11:06 am | Hardware and OS and Software
