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How to Make a Bootable xrdiags CD for the Xserve G5

By unixgeek » Posted on July 21, 2005 - 10:03am

A colleague has posted an interesting set of steps to his .Mac home page on creating a bootable diagnostics CD for the Xserve G5. What’s the big deal on this? Since the default configuration of the Xserve G5 is without a video card, Apple made the diagnostics for the Xserve G5 in a NetBoot image rather than a CD like the standard Apple Hardware Test for other computers, like the iBook or PowerBook.

For a lot of people, setting up a NetBoot server requires technical skills that they may not have or don’t necessarily have the time to learn (e.g. the school teacher who gets stuck running the school server because it was installed in that room.)

Even for technically oriented people, having to set up a NetBoot server to test the hardware on the Xserve G5 can be down right annoying at best to impossible (think: no other Mac OS X Server).

Here’s the link to their instructions. Enjoy.

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Just in case that page ever
Adam Knight on September 11, 2005 - 10:13am
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Just in case that page ever goes away:


Requirements:

  • Mac OS X 10.3 or Mac OS X Server 10.3.3 or later
  • Apple Developer Tools



Note: This was tested on version 1.0.4 of the Xserve Remote Diagnostics


Method 1

  1. Download and mount the XserveRemoteDiag104.dmg disc image
  2. Install the Xserve Remote Diagnostics
  3. Use Disk Utility to create a “Disk Image from Folder” of the folder ‘/private/tftpboot/xrdiags’ using the Image Format of “read/write”
  4. Mount the disk image
  5. Run the following terminal commands (replacing >volume path< with the absolute path the the mounted disk image)
    1. /Developer/Tools/SetFile -t “tbxi” /<Volume path>/diags
    2. sudo bless —folder /<Volume path>
  6. unmount and burn the disk image



Method 2

  1. Download and mount the XserveRemoteDiag104.dmg disc image
  2. run the following terminal commands (replacing >volume path< with the absolute path the the mounted disk image)
    1. gzip -cd /Volumes/Xserve\ Remote\ Diagnostics/XserveRemoteDiagnostics.pkg/Contents/Archive.pax.gz | pax -r -s ‘,./private/tftpboot/,./,’ ‘./private/tftpboot/*’
    2. hdiutil create -srcfolder ./xrdiags -format UDRW xrdiagscd.dmg
    3. hdiutil mount xrdiagscd.dmg
    4. /Developer/Tools/SetFile -t “tbxi” /<Volume path>/diags
    5. sudo bless —folder /<Volume path>
  3. Unmount and burn the disk image


— cp

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