[MacOS] Install Leopard from .dmg Image to your System

“and first for something complete different”: Muzaq… coding or administrating system can’t do without gooood muzaq. Check our latest tunes here :-)

This time we’re gonna install Leopard from a .dmg image instead from DVD. The purpose is having a repair and recovery system by the hand in case you need it. My story is this: after having had a clean install of Leopard finished and having had applied all the updates, my MBP simply crashed again and again (two mouse pointers error – I found a solution in the meantime: that bug belongs to the Leopard Graphics Update – read it here howto fix it), since at that point I could not fix it, I then decided to reinstall. Something seemed fishy and would hopefully be gone after another fresh install. But as you expect: the same problem occurred again. I then decided to restore my previous tiger install and installed the Leopard DVD to a second partition. This way nothing can stop me, whereever I am, whatever does not work…

Ok what to do now?

I assume

  • You don’t have a bootcamp partition installed
  • means your harddrive is single partitioned
  • You got Tiger installed
  • You know the size of your harddrive (you can also find out in “Disk Utility”)

Now, let the game begin…

    1. Insert Leopard installation DVD into your drive
    2. Start “Disk Utility” to make a .dmg image of your installation DVD (see picture)
    3. click the Mac OS X Install DVD (highlight it) and choose New Image

 

beforedmg

  1. Choose Read as type of image and name it Mac OS X Install DVD(see picture)

    makedmg

  2. Wait forever (15-20minutes)
  3. Close Diskutility and
  4. Open terminal and enter:
    sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 139G "HFS+" "LeoInst" 10G
    (in this example the total harddrive size is 149GB = “139G + 10G”)
  5. This command resizes the first partition to 139GB and generates a second partition formated in “HFS+” with size of 10GB. The name of the second partition will be LeoInst (disk0s1 is in this case the EFI partition – see here, what makes the EFI partition so interesting, system partition starts at disk0s2 – that’s the partition we’re gonna resize and split into disk0s2 and disk0s3)
  6. After having executed this command successfully you need to reboot
  7. After reboot open “Disk Utility” again
  8. You should now see two partitition on your harddrive (see picture)

    LeoInst

  9. Click on the second partition named “LeoInst”
  10. Click “Restore”
  11. As Source choose your Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg image (should be located on the desktop!)
  12. As destination drag and drop the second partition called “LeoInst”
  13. click “Restore”
  14. Wait about forever to have the DVD copied to your drive (again 15-20mins)

    diskutil01

  15. Close Disk Utility
  16. Go to “System Preferences” and choose “Startup Disk”
  17. Choose your Mac OS X Install DVD (which is in fact now a partition) as start volume
  18. reboot system and install Leopard

Additional notes

These instructions are intended to be applied to genuine Apple systems rather than HackMacs. In my case I used my MacBook Pro. Because of the different .kexts to be applied to HackMacs this guide will not work for those systems! Be warned!

8 thoughts on “[MacOS] Install Leopard from .dmg Image to your System

  1. ricardo

    thank’s to this tutorial i could upgrade mi macbook pro from tiger to leopard.
    thank’s it really work perfect!!

  2. Mike

    actually this works fine for those of us with normal computers that use the boot-132 cd and select the partition with leopard on it to boot from. this is the method i usually use so that i don’t need to burn a dual-layer dvd.

  3. Simon

    After going through step 7 I keep getting this

    Welcome to Darwin!
    unknown-00-11-24-c4-94-04:~ Morgs$ sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 139.1G “HFS+” “LeoInst” 10G
    Password:
    Volume format does not support resizing
    Disk Utility Tool
    Usage: diskutil resizeVolume [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node] size

    Non-destructively resize a disk. You may increase or decrease its size.
    When decreasing size, you may optionally supply a list of new partitions to create.
    Ownership of the affected disk is required.
    Valid partition sizes are in the format of .
    Valid sizes are B(ytes), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes)
    Example: 10G (10 gigabytes), 4.23T (4.23 terabytes), 5M (5 megabytes)
    resizeVolume is only supported on GPT media with a Journaled HFS+ filesystem.
    A size of “limits” will print the range of valid values for the current filesystem.
    Example: diskutil resizeVolume disk1s3 10G
    JHFS+ HDX1 5G MS-DOS HDX2 5G
    Valid filesystems: “Case-sensitive HFS+” “Journaled HFS+” “Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+” “HFS+” “HFS” “MS-DOS FAT32” “MS-DOS FAT16” “MS-DOS” “MS-DOS FAT12” “UFS” “Linux” “Swap”

    please help

  4. jayman

    On step 16, it doesn’t let me restore and it says ” Unable to scan “LeoInst” (Resource Busy) “

  5. Pingback: Install OS X Leopard 10.5 in Mac PowerPC | tsiubiu

  6. Zach

    FYI – this will only work for Intel based macs using the GUID partition table format, it will not work with PPC macs, because they only use the APT, apple partition table format. resizeVolume was introduced in 10.4.6 for use with Intel systems, so even though you might have a PPC G5 or something that you’re trying it on (like I am) it won’t work. Sucks, but thems the breaks.

  7. jParnell8839

    @Zach

    True, but on the PPC G5, it works just as well if you have an external hard drive or thumb drive. it has to be a 16GB thumb drive (as 8GB drives are literally kilobytes too small to apply the image when formatted as HFS+). You might get some errors doing it, I did, but easiest way to fix it:

    Reboot
    Open Disk Utility
    Format partition as Empty
    Format as Mac Extended Journaled
    drag source
    drag destination partition
    Click restore

    @bailey (a little late, I know) it does work with ISO images

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