Looking to Install OS X Snow Leopard from a USB Flash Drive? If you want to skip the steps and get your USB installation drive quickly, check out our pre-configured USB Snow Leopard Installation Drive. Read on if you’d like to create a USB Installation yourself.
Update: You can now find instructions on how to install OS X Snow Leopard from a USB Drive at Maciverse.
If you’re one of those people that continually adjust system settings, make changes in terminal, and try new and experimental software then you’ve probably done something in the past to your OS X installation that has compromised performance or made things stop working completely. Data loss, or application failures will make you wish you had your iPhoto Backup set so that you didn’t loose all your digital photos when your system changes made you loose OS X functionality.
On the other hand, you may have installed the latest updates to OS X and various programs just stopped working. If either of these sound like you, you may find it handy to have a back up OS X 10.5 Leopard install that you can boot to and make adjustments to your system.
Installing OS X Leopard on a USB Flash Drive is much easier than expected. In fact it is almost the exact same experience you had when installing the device on your Mac originally. For a complete install you’ll need at least an 8gb Flash drive or a larger external USB Hard Drive.
To install OS X Leopard 10.5 follow these steps:
- Insert the OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD into your Mac
- Open system preferences, start up disks, and restart into the OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD
- Once your computer restarts into OS X Leopard, continue through the introduction and agreement pages that will be displayed until you get to the screen that asks you to select your installation Volume.
- You can’t yet select your USB Flash drive, so select Utility from the menu bar and open Disk Utility
- In Disk Utility, select the USB Flash Drive and then Select Partition.
- From here select 1 Partition and then click Options
- Select GUID Partition Table so that our computer can boot from the device
- Name the Volume and click Apply.
- Close out Disk Utility and return to the Volume selection screen. Select your Volume and continue the OS X 10.5 Installation.
- If you’re installing on an 8gb Flash Drive you’ll need to be sure to customize the installation and remove any printer drivers, language and fonts, and anything else so you can reduce your install to fit on the device itself.
Now that you’ve installed OS X 10.5 on your Flash Drive, it should boot up to the device anytime you select it from System Preference >> Start up Disks.
From my experience running OS X 10.5 on a USB Flash Drive always runs a bit slow at first but performance increases significantly after 10 minutes or so.
If you would like to install a bare bone OS X installation on a device smaller than 8gb see this guide designed for OS X 10.4 but works essentially the same for 10.5
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If you don’t have a large enough USB Drive, the SanDisk Cruzer Micro 16 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive 
For additional Mac Help and help with booting OS X leopard from a USB Flash Drive, please be sure to visit our Mac Forums and post your questions.
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Sorry to break this to you, but the subject at hand is not about installing OSX Snow Leopard on a hackintosh (Non Mac Hardware)… If you need material or resources for that please direct your browser to the most useful tool on the interwebs… G O O G L E . C O M. Just a word of advice… If you have no idea what you’re talking about (pertaining to OSX on non-Mac Hardware), i’d suggest you give up now, and fork over the necessary portion of your salary to buy a Mac.
Also worth noting, you need a FULL copy of OSX Leopard/Snow Leopard to perform any of the steps outlined above (if that is the case). Not the CD that came with your hardware. That is “not” a full copy of OSX.
I have followed this threat exactly how its detailed, and have notice how active and helpful you all are on the message board… and typically try and fix myself, but can’t figure it out…
Here it is:
I have 10.5.6 dmg file on a large external HD, and want to install from a 8gb flash drive.
Trying this on macbook pro (last years model) and wife’s white macbook.
What I’ve tried:
I boot up into EFI window( i think thats what its called) and through disk utilities, select my 8gb to be a GUID partition, then proceed to restore.
source: 1TB external USB HD – also used as my time machine backup
restore: 8gb flash drive
Restores goes as planned… i’ve tried deleting and restoring like 6 times.
I select flash drive from Utilities – > start up and select 8gb bootable flash drive ->restart. press option during startup-> make sure I select correct drive. I select my 8gb flash drive and proceeds to bootup, but never goes past grey window with apple logo and little circle loading icon(i’ve waited 10-15 minutes to see if it gets past that window, but never does). It happens on my macbook pro and macbook, so I know i’m doing something wrong.
Just an added note, I initially wanted to install from my time machine external HD… went to disk utilities and specified the 10.5.6.dmg file as source and same HD as restore location. Everything seems to work. I have the install file in my root directory. When I restart and select external HD, boots up into Welcome installation window -> Agreement -> select where i wanna install window. Right as it starts to install, I get a yellow triangle. Mac OS X could not be installed on your computer. The installer could not locatre the data it needed to install the software. Check your install….. hope i’ve covered it all.
yawn. already got a mac, troll.
i’m just exploring, elitist-wannabe, go shower your insults elsewhere
[...] on your flash drive, you may need to follow steps 5 – 7 on on installing onto a USB drive to make sure the drive is bootable before you get [...]
Hi,
this tutorial is very interesting. I want to install a system for rescue. A small system with all software working on it, which i use and need for study. In the case that my normal System wont work when i really need it…
Is it only possible to install on USB-Drives and Sticks? Or can I use the SD-Slot for it? I’d no luck with USB-Sticks. SDHC probably is the best way for me, when it works?
Anybody tested it or is it impossible for the MAC boot up on SD?
Marino
Those were insults? Sorry i made you QQ. If you had half the brain cell in your head, then you’d know how to use a search engine. That’s not elitist, that’s common sense. You’d also have the “common sense” (there are those two words again) to not ask about performing “illegal” (yes illegal, cause you’re infringing copyright) installations on “NON-MAC hardware”. Ever heard of Psystar? (use that tool i gave you, Google). By the way you sound like one of those “special” account manager type of individuals who expect their HD to fix everything… If i’m a troll sir, you’re one useless Tool. Welcome to the information age dumbass.
will this method work with windows based computers ex. compaq
when i partition it can as a master boot record to boot on my windows computers. how could i make it work on intel macs and windows systems
Adam
Ok. So I have a 32 gig usb flash drive and i am trying to create a boot drive and it doesnt work. i boot from the dvd and it says the flash drive can not have os installed on it????? i have tried the restore methosd. no luck… I have reformatted flash drive. I am outta ideas, any help…oh this is on a ppc with a 32 gig flash drive from integral. dvd os 10.5 is a retail version….????
not sure exactly how this works with the ppc. But be sure you’ve set the GUID partition correctly.
how to burn dmg file to 2 dvd ?i want to install mac os to non apple laptop..it can be done or no ?!or i should be convert it to iso file fisrt before burning?
thanks
how can i install leopard from a usb, i have a acer aspire one and i have windows 7, and i dont have a mac, i want to install leopard in my acer aspire one without a Dvd, i have only an acer aspir one, windows 7, and a 16Gb Usb
Hey, This is for installing on a Mac. I’m not sure of the process needed to prep a PC for OS X installation via USB.
Hi. I downloaded the torrent for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and I formated my 160gb external hard drive but I cant figure out how to get my copy of snow leopard to install on my computer any help would be great. I am currently running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 on an intel iMac.
I haven’t done this with the torrent download so I’m not sure what the problem is. Most people that have had issues have had them with a torrent DL.
No the torrent file is just snow leopard dvd that you can mount and then it appears as if it is the install disk accept it looks like a drive.
[...] Install & Boot OS X Leopard from a USB Flash Drive __________________ June 2007 July 2009 [...]
[...] how to install os X from a usb flash drive summarizes the steps how to format the usb device [...]
Thank you so much. When I try this I will let you know how it went.
How about using a USB memory stick to back up mac osx from your computers hard drive,just like you would for pictures or applications,is this possible?
Many thanks.
Karl.
You can use time machine to backup OS X to an external drive. USB flash drives can be utilized, but they’ll need to be big enough to hold on the data (very few are large enough).
[...] I had an USB Drive SanDisk with 16GB. Next step, how to install Leopard on USB Drive? I used this tutorial. The only thing that it didn't say was that you have to go through a customize installation. Do it [...]
[...] seem to recall there was a method to boot via USB 2.0, but I can't recall it now." Install & Boot OS X Leopard from a USB Flash Drive | Mac Help from Maciverse "It has firewire but my macbook doesnt" And that is also one of the reasons that [...]
I’ve tried this method on my usb sata 500gb HD.. and it is not booting.. in few sec it goes back to dual boot loader.. is there any other way to boot ?.
if u all can read, you will notice that disk utility has both options on partitioning HD’s, GUID for intel based Macs (if u have an intel mac, u have to format your usb stick in GUID), if you have a PowerPC (G3,G4,G5), you have Apple Partition Map, that does make your usb stick bootable under PPC macs…
i haven’t tried none of the above yet, i’ll see if i can find my 8gb usb stick…
[...] I mentioned earlier, one of my fellow bloggers mentioned having OS X on a flash drive. It’s a fairly straightforward process to get Leopard on a flash drive, but know that you’ll need one with a lot of space—at least [...]
[...] Der Vorgang dauert ca. 20Min und danach lässt sich MacOS X direkt vom USB-Stick einrichten. Hier ein Artikel der den Vorgang genauer beschreibt: http://www.maciverse.com/install-boot-os-x-leopard-from-a-usb-flash-drive.html [...]
[...] The solution i came up with was to create a bootable USB drive with the correct version of the OS X install disc. Here is how you do it. [...]
THANK YOU! This worked great. In fact, I partitioned an 80GB USB hard drive, and used the same .dmg/guid trick to create bootable disc images of my original macbook restore DVD which was 2 discs AND my leopard DVD ALL on my USB drive. So what I did was took the USB drive and partitioned it to be 4 guid drives, broken down as 8GB, 7GB, 6GB and the remainder for the rest of the drive. I imaged the installed DVDs into each partition using the restore feature(I got info on each DVD to see how big it was first) and bam! Done. Actually, it took a long time, but I kept busy in between chasing my kids around the house.
So now.. when I want to restore my system, I just boot up to my USB drive and I’ve got all of my DVDs copied as images on said drive… so I just install away.
MANY THANKS!
Benny, Nice solution! Glad it worked for you.
It workd on my Imac G3, but it doesnt work on my imac g5 since it wont boot from usb.Any way to solve this???
[...] 打造USB MAC 启动安装盘：http://www.maciverse.com/install-boot-os-x-leopard-from-a-usb-flash-drive.html [...]
Dan did not mention if the OS X Install DVD to be “restored” has to be a retail copy or it can be the restore DVD no.1. Elias says it must be a retail copy or a rip…
I tried to do this using my OS X Restore DVD 1. Since the first step, the Mac OS X Install DVD would not be recognized as a source (no plus “+” sign). I created a compressed image of the OS X Install disc that could be dragged onto the source field, hit restore and got the message “Could not find any scan information. The source image needs to be imagescanned before it can be restored.”
Any ideas ?
Hey, I have MacBook Pro with 320 NV GP, I have done all the instruction but unfortunate it does not works,
I tray my best to boot from Snow leopard CD, USB HD & Flash but always the Dump Language message it appear, also I downloaded 10.5 X but it never boot.
I really don’t know what’s going on.
are you using a retail DVD or an image you downloaded from the internet? Images from the internet have often not worked with this process.
Why doesn’t the install disk show up in Disk Utility? It’s in the disk drive just fine. Any Ideas?
[...] 終於搞定用USB硬碟安裝Mac OS X, 原本想說10.4勉強用, 不過後來真的10.4用起來綁手綁腳, 且有很多軟體限定要10.5以後才能用, 受不了想來試試看網路上所說的用USB硬碟安裝10.6 Install & Boot OS X Leopard from a USB Flash Drive | Mac Help from Maciverse [...]
This works for me on a PowerPC (PPC) iMac G5:
source: http://mediacaster.nl/usb_boot_imac_powerpc_g5.html
1. Be sure to partition the disk with an Apple Partition Map (i.e. not GUID or MBR)
2. Determine the partition where your bootable image it situated (e.g. an MacOSX DVD or DMG restored to a partion with Disk utility’s restore). This might be disk1s3 in which case the partition number is 3
3. Restart your iMac while holding down Command-Option-O-F (Alt-Cmd-O-F). This will land you in Open Firmware.
4. Type:
dev / ls
to get the device tree/list.
Look for something in the output like:
/usb@b
/disk@1
As we’re talking about a tree here, write down the complete path to this node. In my case it would be:
/ht/pci@2/usb@b/disk@1
5. Type:
devalias ud /ht/pci@2/usb@b/disk@1
In other words: make ‘ud’ equal to the path you found in step 4.
6. Now verify you got the right disk:
dir ud:3,\
(3 is the partition number you wrote down in step 2)
And look for a file with tbxi attribute, probably in:
\System\Library\CoreServices\BootX, e.g.:
dir ud:3,\System\Library\CoreServices
7. Then boot from it:
boot ud:3,\System\Library\CoreServices\BootX
8. Presto !
USB’s your uncle.
I just wanted to help everyone else out who’s on the google search for how to make a snow leopard bootable usb install WITH WINDOWS(Not OS X like the first 20 pages of the search explain…).
You need a program called “TransMac”, you’ll also need an 8GB Flash drive (with nothing on it). I used MagicISO(trial won’t do it… sorry) to expand my dmg to it’s full size which adds another gig to total size. Next I used TransMac to “Format for Mac use” and formated to HFS+. Then I used the option to “Use disk image to format”. Takes a while… fills ur drive to the near 7.50 gigs.
I don’t use any form of a Hackintosh but with the massive failure of the 2009 superdrive….. There are many legitimate needs for this of which is very under-documented.