How do I make a Leopard recovery disc?
"Leopard is perfect, why would you need a recovery disc?" That's the short answer from the Apple zealots. Adam Turner found the long answer is somewhat more complicated.
If you live in the world of Windows, you're familiar with the concept of a recovery disc - that special disc you only break out on a dark and stormy night when your PC decides to give up the ghost. A recovery disc lets you boot your PC using an alternate OS - usually a flavour of DOS or Windows lite. From here you can troubleshoot your system and even initiate a system restore from a backup.
So where's my Leopard recovery disc when disaster strikes? The slightly longer answer from the Mac faithful is; just use the Leopard DVD that came with your Mac. You can't run Leopard, but you can run the Disk Utility and initiate a system restore using a backup made by Time Machine or a third-party app such as SuperDuper.
That's all fine and dandy, but what if your Leopard disc isn't at hand? What if everything goes pear-shaped and you need to perform a system restore while you're away from home. You probably don't carry your original Leopard DVD in your bag because it's too precious. So all you want to do is create a spare boot disc to carry for emergencies - it doesn't even have to run Leopard, just the Disk Utility app will do so you can run a system restore. It's simple to do in the world of Windows, but not so in Mac land.
As you've probably guessed, this isn't merely a hypothetical scenario. My MacBook chucked a major hissy fit last week while I was working in a cafe, refusing to see my DATA partition and thus acting as if I'd done a clean install. My data was still intact, but I couldn't track down the cause or find an easy solution, so a system restore seemed like the best course of action. (I realised later the problem was due to multiple mount points for the DATA partition, created after a crash when the partition wasn't unmounted properly. I know how to repair it, but I'm still looking for the reason why the DATA partition doesn't always unmount properly)
When it comes to backups, I use SuperDuper to create backup images of the Macintosh HD partition on my MacBook and save them as a disk image on the DATA partition. That way I can restore the OS while leaving my data intact.
If I stored these SuperDuper images in their own dedicated partition, I could boot from this partition and initiate a system restore without the need for a Leopard disc. Unfortunately I can't spare the space on my hard drive for yet another partition, which is why I'm eyeing off this 500GB beast from Seagate. Meanwhile I need to boot from a Leopard disc if I want to restore from my SuperDuper disk image. Another option is to make SuperDuper backups to an external FireWire drive, which are also bootable, but a fragile FireWire drive is still not the kind of thing you want to lug around in your bag every day.
Meanwhile back at the cafe, my MacBook was reduced to an expensive paperweight until I could get home to my Leopard DVD. I was about to head off on a three day conference, so I was nervous about the fact I didn't know what caused the problem. I didn't fancy taking my precious Leopard disc on my travels, or a FireWire drive, so I decided to create my own Leopard boot disc - assuming it would be a simple thing to do. It wasn't.
Part of the problem is that the official Leopard boot disc is a dual layer disk holding 7GB of data, but I didn't have any dual-layer DVDs at hand. I figured it would be easy to find a stripped down Leopard image online, designed for use as a recovery disc. It wasn't. The DIY solutions I found generally required OS 10.4 Tiger and/or buying third party software and then stripping bits out of Leopard. From reports I read, such discs are incredibly slow to boot.
At this point I even considered downloading the Kalyway Hackintosh disc image, to see if I could boot my MacBook from it and run the Disk Utility tool.
In the end I decided the easiest option was to install Leopard on an 8GB USB stick, from which I could boot by holding down the option key as I started up the MacBook. I really only needed access to the Disk Utility, but of course it then takes 30 minutes to restore from a SuperDuper image. Having a fully-working copy of Leopard on the USB stick means that if disaster strikes I can boot from the USB stick and continue working straight away, leaving the system restore until I've got a spare 30 minutes.
Until recently price would have been the biggest deterrent to such a solution, but I picked up an 8GB USB stick from Officeworks for a mere $29. Now creating my Leopard Dark and Stormy Night USB stick was pretty straight forward. Insert the USB stick into your MacBook, fire up the Disk Utility, and select the USB drive. Now click on the Partition tab, set the Volume Scheme to 1 partition and then click on options and select GUID Partition Table (which means it can be used as a boot disc for an Intel Mac). After a format I was told the USB stick's partition size was 7.15GB, with 6.1GB available.
Now it's time to pull out your Leopard disc. The Leopard recovery DVD shipped with Macs are generally configured to only work with that model Mac, so if possible use a retail Leopard disc so it will work with any modern Mac. When you run the installer and select the USB stick you'll be told the installation requires 11.4GB, but if you select customise and untick everything but Essential System Software, you'll will squeeze it in with 71.1MB to spare.
The installation process takes about an hour, after which you can reboot your MacBook while holding the option key and select the USB stick as the boot drive. You'll need to go through the Welcome to Leopard routine, after which you're faced with a beautiful fresh Leopard install. Don't install any system updates, as there won't be room unless you've opted for a USB stick greater than 8GB. Still, the fact that it's on a USB stick and not a DVD means you can tweak a few Leopard settings to your liking, such as Expose and Spaces, and maybe install a few troubleshooting tools.
Leopard running on a USB stick was sluggish but certainly useable on my 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB of RAM. That was fine because all I wanted to do was run the Disk Utlility, after which it was a simple task to restore the SuperDuper image from my DATA partition onto the Macintosh HD partition.
There are more detailed instructions around on how to strip Leopard down even further, so you can squeeze it on a single layer DVD or smaller USB stick. Still, when you can pick up an 8GB stick for under $30 it doesn't seem worth going to the trouble of hacking Leopard down even further. Now my Leopard recovery USB stick can happily lurk in the pocket of my travel bag, ready to be called upon if disaster strikes.
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