Make Bootable Mac OSX86 USB Stick Installer Yourself.

1 February 2009 by Vinay 28 Comments

If you have a netbook like MSI Wind or Asus EEEPC and figuring out how to Install OSX86,Then first of all you have to create a bootable USB stick because netbooks doesn’t have Optical drives.The procedure is easy but you have to arrange a Mac or Hack {OSX86} for this guide.You need to have a USB stick 4Gb / 8GB according to size of your OSX86 Distro like iAtkos sized at 2.5 Gb so 4GB Pendrive is sufficient while iPC sized at 4.4 GB and 8GB pendrive is needed.

Many times we need to test a dual layer DVD but don’t ahve a Dual layer DVD RW in these conditions OSX86 USB Stick Installer is very precious.

Requirements :
USB stick 4GB / 8GB.
ISO Mac OSX86 Leopard.
Mac Machine.
OSX86 tool Download here.

1. First, we need to prepare the USB drive. Fire up Disk Utility, select the USB drive, and go to the partition tab. Select “1 partition” from the drop-down menu, name the drive whatever you wish (i.e. Mac OS X Installer), make sure the format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in the next field, and then select the “Options” button below the partition map picture. Select MBR (Master Boot Record) not Apple GUID. Select “OK” and then apply your changes. Disk Utility will create 1 partition, use MBR, etc.

2. Now, “restore” the image of the DVD installer onto the USB drive. I’m using an image file (ISO) but you can use a DVD also. The image must be listed in the left pane of Disk Utility, if it’s not there, drag the image file over. Select the USB drive, go to the “Restore” tab. It’s pretty straightforward from here. Select your image/DVD as the source, and the USB drive as the target. And away you go.

3. Run OSx86 Tools, click install EFI/Run FDISK, choose to install PC EFI 8 on your USB Flash Disk.

That’s it. Just restart and boot from USB Flash Disk, and now we can start install Leopard from USB Flash Disk.

28 Comments »

tehsusenoh said:

Any chance of doing this on Windows?
I don’t have any spare DVDs.

# 2 February 2009 at 4:38 am

Chris said:

This is great my friend has been wanting to do this forever. Great work.

# 2 February 2009 at 7:24 pm

suco2009 said:

Thank you for this wonderful guide. I’m able to install a retail leopard on my computer. However, when I’ve done, reboot, and got “boot0: error.” I think I need to install PCEFI v.9 on my computer, but I don’t know HOW.

# 7 February 2009 at 8:11 pm

Vinay Prashar said:

@ SUCO 2009

Check here http://www.ihackintosh.com/2009/01/download-pc-efi-v9-chameleon-bootloader-one-click-installer/

# 7 February 2009 at 8:32 pm

suco2009 said:

Thank you Vinay Prashar for quick response.
But my problem is, after I install a retail disk, and reboot, my computer cannot start. it is stucked at “boot0:error.”

I downloaded what you suggested, but I cannot install it if the computer cannot start. Any idead?

# 7 February 2009 at 9:49 pm

Chris C said:

You might wanna elaborate on some of the vague points:

1. Disk to Use. There’ll be a couple of possible choices. Picking the wrong one could be disastrous.

2. Click the “Install EFI” button is actually step 4.

# 10 February 2009 at 10:50 pm

antemati said:

moze li se i snow leopard pripremit da se instalira sa usb stika
dali moze i dmg slika

# 11 February 2009 at 2:30 am

bnash said:

Note: This only seems to work on an Intel computer. I get an error on my PPC computer that it couldn’t be completed.

# 2 March 2009 at 10:04 am

iHaX said:

Thanks!

# 14 March 2009 at 10:29 pm

madoc1 said:

Impossible to boot on the disk
I get Error partition HFS

# 4 April 2009 at 11:23 pm

Henry said:

You’ll need a Mac or another Hack running 10.5+. I have an old tibook with 10.4.11 and OSx86 tools will not run on it. Chameleon might work instead but I’ve been battling a multiboot disaster for 4 days now. Linux comes first.

# 3 June 2009 at 7:26 am

Cortez said:

I am using a Dell 1525 and intaled kelyway to make boot pen of iPC final. Maybe who does not have mac try to vmware it.

# 5 June 2009 at 5:12 am

isama said:

Damn! I wanted to try this tonight, but i need a mac to make myself a mac! Ah well, I know who is gonna use the shiny macpro my school bought a month ago

# 21 June 2009 at 12:47 am

tom said:

ok so i have done everything written here, but the installation sequence gets stuck on this line:
“BSD root: disk1s1, major 14, minor 3″.

I have tried -v -F and -x (safe mode) flags. nothing worked.

anyone? please?

# 17 July 2009 at 10:56 pm

Christa Buchanan said:

i cant get it to work with my leo4all 10.5.2 install.iso i have followed all the instructions but the usb just wont boot

what have i done wrong?

# 25 July 2009 at 6:15 am

eli said:

this solution wouldn’t work for me using a 16gb cruzer micro.

Had to install PCEFI v.9 (thanks Vinay!) to the flash drive instead of using OSx86 tools.

Now works perfectly!

# 28 July 2009 at 10:08 pm

7eed said:

I did do this within Windows. I did it with a virtual version of Mac OSX using VMWare. The thing is you need at least 25 gigs of free space and about 6 hours for free time to do this. The benefit is that the install will be 10x faster than a DVD. Do I recommend it? Yes. Is the time worth it? Yes. So, good luck to all who do this. Make sure you have something to do in the meantime or else it will be very very very boring.

# 5 August 2009 at 2:33 pm

Gino said:

1. Instead of installing PC EFI can I also get the latest Chameleon2 RC2 installer and install it to the usb-drive?
2. Can I replace the vanilla kernel on with dmitri’s kernel so the installer boots on AMD machines?

# 25 August 2009 at 3:21 pm

Careless Ubuntu installation making my hackintosh un-bootable « just visit the real blog @ http://antariksa.web.id said:

[...] this to be installed, select Chameleon EFI as the EFI to install .. and follow the process [use this as a guidance]. The last thing is installing Chameleon on that disk … just run the .pkg and [...]

# 30 August 2009 at 4:57 pm

Chris said:

Hi,

Is there a way to do this on Windows XP (i.e. to partition it correctly and use something similar to OSx86 Tools but on Windows)?

Tx

# 30 August 2009 at 10:13 pm

Vinay (author) said:

@ Chris No you can do this on a Mac OS X only..

# 31 August 2009 at 4:26 am

Andrew said:

Hello,
Thanks for posting such a clear tutorial. I have a problem, I have only a Tiger (10.4) available so no point in trying OSX Tools.
Where can I get good instructions for doing the samething through terminal.
Is something about placing boot0 into diskX , boot1h into HFS partition (diskXsN) and copy boot to / folder of the HFS partition (diskXsN ?
If that’s the case where can I get the right files ?

Thank you very much, your work for the community is excellent.

Best regards,
Andrew

# 11 December 2009 at 9:13 pm

solidkundi said:

hey i try to do this with my USB Wester Digital 1 terabyte…. i dont have any usb drive over 4gb at the moment…so i was trying to make my terabyte into a Mac Journaled format….but it keeps saying file system error??? any ideas why?

# 17 December 2009 at 11:34 pm

Krishna pathak said:

Umm I followed these exact same instrustions

I formatted my USB Drive as HFS+ (MBR)

Disk Utility successfully restored my iPC OSx86 Universal ISO

Then I used OSx86 Tools for PC EFI V8, that worked..

Upon boot for the USB Drive I just got a flashing hyphen -

# 25 February 2010 at 5:58 am

Panicman said:

I got the same problem first, then i installed the chameleon boot loader from osx86 tools, but now i have a KP while loading the flash. I bootet some time before from the same image with an external DVD-Drive and didn’t have one. something must had went wrong.

I want to install windosx on my LG x110

# 23 March 2010 at 2:30 am

Tyler W said:

I have an AMD machine, does it work on those?, i tried it following all setps and i got the the bootloader and managed to load the boot options menu.(but i cant seem to get the apple logo to appear). is there a command which i can use a different kernel?, thanks in advance, tylerwatt12@gmail.com

# 31 March 2010 at 3:40 am