Loading ...
For additional help with booting OS X leopard from a USB Flash Drive, please be sure to visit our Forums and post your questions.
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.
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
If you’ve enjoyed this article, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to discover more ways to optimize your Mac experience.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Related posts:
June 20, 2008
do you know how make a live cd mac os x ?
June 20, 2008
popoy, I haven’t come across a way to setup a live CD for mac os x. But this essentially provides the same tool capability. You can run OS X and access all of your files on your HD, run applications, etc without impact the other OS installations.
Of course, this has only been tested on Apple Computers. OSX86 builds have not been tested.
June 22, 2008
[...] I won’t even say anythng, except ENJOY [...]
August 9, 2008
[...] Maciverse » Blog Archive » Install & Boot OS X Leopard from a USB Flash Drive on June 17th, 2008 [...]
August 20, 2008
[...] Install OS X Leopard On a Flash Drive – If you want to have a safety net for times when you’re having hard drive trouble, you may want to have a bootable version of OS X on a Flash Drive. [...]
September 23, 2008
Hi, Do you know if it is possible to partition a 16gb flash drive, say 2 partitions, one of 10GB and 1 of 4GB (these things are always smaller than they say) and then use the larger partition to install a bootable copy of 10.5?
September 23, 2008
Luke, I haven’t tried this myself, but I don’t see why this wouldn’t be possible. Try partitioning the flash drive with Disk Utility and then follow the steps above with the larger partition.
The only issue I see coming up would be the lack of ability to partition the flash drive.
November 7, 2008
[...] How to install and boot OS X from USB device [...]
December 24, 2008
I does work for me,I have a 3000 N100 lenovo and 16G cruzer and I install leopard 10.5.2 on my usb and it work the same as it was on my lenovo laptop except much slower I have 3 gig of memory but with the usb OSX on it work like I have 1gig or less memory I just did regular install like you will do on your laptop but boot it from the usb from the bios,always make a back up of your files( yeah your mp3`s and porno) but never be afraid of getting your hands dirty on it,or you will never learn how to do it,have fun!!!
December 30, 2008
[...] from USB stick that has SuperDuper on it, with both the USB stick and the backup drive hooked up via USB hub. I [...]
January 5, 2009
[...] a generic bootable USB OSX Leopard installer on a 16GB Thumb Drive – (instructions & instructions) Upgrades and refreshes are now a breeze. It’s also got all of my licensed apps like Adobe [...]
January 15, 2009
Interesting article, i have bookmarked your blog for future referrence, thanks
January 15, 2009
Thanks gry, let us know how we can help.
January 16, 2009
Is this possible to run on a PC? Maybe with a different partition?
January 17, 2009
I don’t think this will work on a PC. If you used a hacitonish install though you may be able to get it to work.
January 21, 2009
Installation OSX DVD has 10.5.2 version and we have 10.5.6. Is it possible to update OSX installed onto USB Drive and install additional such software as TechTool Pro, Drive Genius etc? In that case we’ll be able to use this USB for main disk repair.
January 22, 2009
Oleg – If you install OSX to the USB Flash drive and boot from it, you can upgrade to 10.5.6 just like you would a normal HD. I’m not sure how to slipstream the install files before installing OSX.
January 28, 2009
mac os download
February 3, 2009
Hi – This hasn’t worked for me. I’m installing OS X Leopard onto a 16G Kingston DataTraveler. I have tried this several times and it boots my wife’s MacBook Core Duo like a champ. But it will not boot my newer Core 2 Duo. It shows up in Startup Disk, but when I restart it eventually bypasses the USB drive and boots from the internal drive. I even cloned (with SuperDuper) a bootable Tiger partition on an external hard drive onto the USB drive, but same results. GUID is chosen. I’ve reformatted and even zeroed out the data on the flash drive, but same results. Thoughts? Thanks.
February 9, 2009
Hello I am running Leopard 10.5.6 on a USB flashdrive, on my PC it works great! I am wondering is there a way to install any software to use with it. Any input is priceless!!
rotchopf@gmail
thanks
February 9, 2009
Chadron – You should be able to install and run any software on it as long as the drive you installed it to has enough free space.
February 12, 2009
Hi all!
@Chadron – Can you give some more info/detail of how you managed to create a bootable USB flashdrive?
I’m stick with this…
Thanks!
February 24, 2009
I’ve got the exact same problem! I’ve followed all the steps to a T, but this MacBook Pro refuses to boot from the disk I’ve setup…
February 24, 2009
eric – have you tried selecting it as a startup disk by holding down option during boot? Are you using one of the new form factor Macbook Pros? I haven’t tried this on the newer models and it may have limitations on how it supplies power to USB ports.
March 3, 2009
any specific benchmarks (or general idea) of how much slower a mac pro, for instance, would run if for some reason you only ever ran it from a usb drive as opposed to from the HDD? thanks for all your help!
March 3, 2009
I don’t have any benchmarks but from my experience it will be significantly slower. The speed is still usable but it won’t function as quickly as a standard HDD.
March 22, 2009
Worked from a dmg file, disc image.
I Partitioned a Ruid the drive, and used Disc Utility and Restored the drive from the dmg file.
Thanks Dan…
March 30, 2009
Hi i am trying this but my usb is not showing up in disk utilities. any help?
March 30, 2009
Zane, does the USB show mounted on your desktop? Have you tried with a different USB drive?
April 25, 2009
I have the exact same problem, for some reason it won’t boot from the usb, only from the internal HD, despite me choosing to start from the USB start disc.
April 25, 2009
Matthew – Are you using one of the new form factor Macbook Pros? I haven’t tried this on the newer models and it may have limitations on how it supplies power to USB ports.
May 2, 2009
My installed OS X.5 on my hard drive (installed from retail disk) doesn’t contain the required receipts (still boots fine I guess), so I have no way to copy them to the pen drive. Any ideas?
May 3, 2009
Joeyslaptop – Not sure exactly what you’re having trouble with. When does it prompt for the receipts, what are you trying to do, and what exactly is the hangup?
May 4, 2009
Dan -
Thanks for the response. It turns out that the issue was with blessing, not with receipts. I also guess I must have been reading multiple pages at once late at night and accidentally posted here thinking that this was one of the pages explaining a manual installation of each package needed for the OS to fit on a small USB drive.
I was using a hackintosh and trying various USB-drive methods for manually installing just to another internal hard drive. In another USB-drive method I found online, the guy got his installation down to about 2 GB. It involved using pacifist, moving and installing packages individually, eliminating unwanted files, copying the receipts from a working Leopard installation on your hard drive, and then blessing the core services folder.
To answer Tymon’s question, yes, you can install OSX onto a USB drive that will work on a PC, but it’s verrryyy involved, and can end up really buggy (drivers, boot loader issues, etc). It’s also guaranteed to not work on many different models of PCs due to driver issues, motherboard configurations, CPUs, etc. Blegh.
Just stick with a Mac if you like OS X – even if you don’t think you can quite afford one. It’s a way better option than learning how to create a PC Hackintosh. The honest truth is that DELL and other PC companies charge you a few hundred up front, but provide horrible customer service and cheap parts. With a Mac, you pay a little bit more upfront, but get solid hardware and service reps that don’t try to sell you parts to replace the broken ones that are still under warranty. In the long run, you pay the same, but get little or no hassle at all from Apple while Compaq, etc don’t mention the long-run costs associated with their products.
Thanks again. Also, I like your method for installing OSX to a USB thumb drive: it’s straight forward and simple enough for novice-advanced users.
May 5, 2009
Thanks joeyslaptop for your help and comment!
May 19, 2009
Hi,
I tried to do as described but installation always failed once the part where data are being copied to USB stick was reached. It end up with yellow triangle and error message, something like it can’t write data to USB. Tried on different platforms (Dell D620, HP nx61x, Asus eee 9x ..) can’t find anywhere what’s the cause of this.
any help appreciated.
P.
May 19, 2009
Petr – I’ve only successfully done this on a Mac. Have you tried this on a Mac? Different USB drive?
May 26, 2009
if u r using vista or windows 7 then,
open command prompt with admin rights,
at the prompt type DISKPART
then LIST DISK, now look up for your 16gb flash drive/pen drive(say disk1 for example)
type SELECT DISK 1
CLEAN
FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY SIZE=N
NOTE: n =8gb n it shud be montioned in bytes
CREATE PARTITION EXTENDED SIZE=N
NOTE: n =8gb n it shud be montioned in bytes
ACTIVE
ASSIGN
EXIT
thatz it now your pendrive has two partitions of 8gb each
June 25, 2009
This idea is interesting; the one issue with running from a USB Key is the burn out due to the swap file being located on the same drive; has anyone tried to relocate it so that it resides on a RAM disk that is automounted as part of the OS startup?
As to those users who can’t boot their newer Macs with the older Leopard DVD, the reason is you’re likely using a version of the OS that is not viable with the newer Mac. So you either will have to use the newer Mac’s Leopard DVD or bring the version of Leopard on the USB Key up to the same level as the new one needs (I would suggest 10.5.6 being your minimum).
Great article by the way, I used to have an emergency bootCD for OS X under Puma and Panther; but this is just as handy and I need it for recovery and diagnostic purposes for my Macs.