Mac Geekery

I remember something very special about my old System 6 machine. That is, the System file was about 400-600 KB and you could put just about any program on a floppy with it, bless it right, and then you had a rescue disk. Things are exponentially more complex for the modern Mac, however. Install disks wind up blowing 400-600 megabytes on the installer and OS alone. It won’t fit on a floppy, and unless you trick it right, it won’t fit on a CD, either.

There’s a solution, though, and it’s kind of funny how it works. You see, Apple provided a tool for something rather different that also works great for this. In my previous article on NetBoot I showed you how to make an installer image that installed a custom package and noted that it was burnable as well. Well, curious thing about it, it does exactly what we need:

• It uses your current OS to build the OS for the image
• It creates an OS that comes in around 500 MB
• It starts one program, which lists others to use

Sounds perfect, really. So what we need to do is make this work for us. That part is astonishingly easy.

The very first thing you need to do is get Apple’s Server Administration tools from their site. Look for “Server Admin Tools”. Download, install, and run Software Update to make sure it’s the latest one (updates are delivered via Software Update, not the website).

Next we need a dummy package. If you don’t mind dating the disk, you can drop a combo updater on the disk as the package. If you’re using a rewritable disk, I would do this simply because reapplying the last combination update is a very simple troubleshooting step, and you need a package for this anyway. If not this, then get something small, like Backup or some security update and use that.

With the package on-disk, go to System Image utility and select an Install image, give it the name you want the volume to have, put gibberish in the remainder of the fields on the first tab and then go to Content. From the menu, pick Custom Package and then drag your package(s) in. Hit the big flashy Create button and wait a while.

When done, go to the NBI folder it made and find the image. This is your precious. The rest is trash; get rid of it. Keep this image. It’s read/write at the moment, so open it up. You may now proceed via one of two methods. If you know me, then you know that they are…

The Remarkably Easy Way

Drag your applications into the /Applications/Utilities folder. When the image boots, you’ll see them in the Utilities menu in the installer.

Once you’ve added the item, eject and burn the image. Done.

The Needlessly Hard Way

I’ll gloss over this one. If you do this, toy with a rewritable disc while trying it.

When the system boots, it’s going to run /etc/rc.cdrom as the step to start the installer. If you edit the last part of the script (cutting the last 30 lines or so) and replace it with a call to your program of choice to replace the installer. Note that you don’t get the fancy Utilities menu or the option of using multiple utilities this way, but if you just want a replacement DiskWarrior CD because your system is newer than their disks, then this is the way to go. In fact, you might just look at their disk and get their rc.cdrom and put DW in the right location so that you get it just the same.