I'm sure the eye-rolling is inbound but I've had a goal for over a decade that I finally realized in 2024!
One drive to boot almost any Mac for purposes of service, restoration or general fooling about that we are inclined to do.
It sounds simple but, as somebody that has repaired hundreds of Macs, I wanted a bit more.
No fewer than a hundred times (all the way back around 2007-2011) I performed this procedure:
Boot from a CD or DVD, select installation, wait, restart, endure the same perturbing dooo-do-do music AGAIN, speed through the "setup" checking "don't share my information, don't ask where I live, leave me alone" etc, booting to a fresh desktop as spotlight whirs into overdrive, warnings and request windows pop up, the mouse speed isn't right, sleep settings are inconvenient oh, and to top it off, ten restarts to get Java and other components up to date.
What if all I wanted to do was check the compatibility of a certain application? More recently, yes in 2023, I've had to install on multiple machines just to see how they perform in Adobe apps and certain games. Especially with games, this means inputing whatever keys for registration and sloughing through the tutorial and settings of the game again and again. Do you want me to quote the thawing scene from Halo:CE? I could 😅
What if I could have installers for multiple Operating Systems on the same drive as live Boot partitions that are preconfigured and ready to drop onto any disk and boot?
Thanks in part to this thread by @ZombiePhysicist , I finally committed to concluding my long-fought cause.
![IMG_7964.JPG]( "IMG_7964.JPG")
This is where it began around 2009-2011. I pulled a failing hard drive from a customer's Mac but decided to at least get some use out of it. Turns out I am still booting from it almost fourteen-years later.
While this worked in general, it normally required turning some screws. I would often remove the internal drive from my MacBook, place this inside, boot and install through Target disk mode to another Mac, or take apart the PowerPC Mac and install to the MacBook via Target Disk.
As easy as it sounds, it wasn't always simple. Tiger still required a working optical drive as well.
The first order of business was to purchase a bus-powered FireWire drive. Second, it should also have USB for ease of use with non-FireWire configs. Lastly, USB 3 at least would easily achieve maximum speeds with 2012 and later Macs without adapters etc.
The other reason for USB is that many Macs simply don't have FireWire. I know there is a Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter, I have one, but that immediately excludes my Polycarbonate MacBook. Having at least USB 3 makes it far more convenient to boot into with such models as my 2012 MacBook Airs and indeed the later models that only have C ports.
![IMG_7969.jpg]( "IMG_7969.jpg")
Thus, this Sony drive (which seems to have been unpopular in the US) checks all of the boxes. It's pocket sized, it's shown currently without the protective rubber (that also seals the ports), and is entirely bus-powered. I got a 500GB and I'm not sure if it was offered in any larger capacities. From around 2011.
Which Systems do we need to boot every Mac?
Without getting greedy, I figured a simple goal was to encompass the earliest Macs with FireWire to the last. Add to that the last Macs capable of booting High Sierra. (I don't want to begin to mess with Mojave or later for this project)
So how do we capture every early FireWire Mac and all High Sierra capable Macs?
Tiger is a start. 10.4.11 has a pretty simple requirement. It turns out that EVERY Mac that has FireWire is capable of booting 10.4.11 minimum. That is to say, if it has FireWire, it can at least support 10.4.11 or higher, no question about it.
Leopard is generally the bridge from PowerPC to Intel. It's not necessary in this scheme for these reasons: There is NO PowerPC Mac that requires Leopard to boot and there is NO Intel Mac that can boot Leopard but cannot boot Snow Leopard. However, the fact that it does add capability to the PowerPC platform that would otherwise be missed and it allows a bit more cross-compatibility with later applications, I'm throwing it in just for convenience.
Now we leave the world of PowerPC and focus on Intel.
Believe it or not, there are some Intel Macs which cannot boot beyond Snow Leopard. To avoid leaving out these early models of Mac mini and MacBook, and to maintain Rosetta capability in general, I'm including 10.6.
Lion would be next in line but I've concluded that there is no model of Mac that is capable of booting Lion but incapable of booting El Capitan! Therefore, anybody that survived the 10.6 Snow Leopard cut will be accommodated by El Capitan.
Finally, to the remaining models as a sort of freebie: Any mac capable of going beyond 10.11 El Capitan is capable of running at least 10.13 High Sierra. High Sierra is the last stop for complete 32bit support, it's a fast and generally stable system, and it bridges over to the new APFS format offering even better capability to solid-state systems or playing nice with all subsequent systems (It currently dual-boots on my APFS-formatted NVME with Sonoma on another "volume").
So with the following; 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.11, 10.13, I'm capable of booting every Mac that has FireWire as well as most models going up to mid-2018!
Next, compatibility on the Mac side.
Only the last PowerPC Macs are capable of booting from GPT disks. To maintain the most compatibility with the oldest (and therefore most difficult) systems, I would have to prioritize the APM table. Can Intel Macs boot from this? Can you create installers on APM?
Yes. No.
Apparently, Apple didn't get around to removing APM boot compatibility before switching to ARM64 and I have no way of knowing if even THAT has support. If you use APM, you will maintain compatibility going back to as far as 1987 when it was introduced! I just confirmed booting an APM High Sierra install on my 2016 MacBook Pro via USB.
Then comes the fun of putting Installers and Live partitions onto the APM drive.
Let's get to it.
10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 disk images and Live boot disks were easy. They do not have any checks or protection when using the restore function. I can't actually recall if 10.6 allows installing onto an APM drive but if so I just installed 10.6 onto a GPT drive then restored that installation to the OmniBoot. All of this was easily accomplished in Disk Utility
10.11 throws a wrench into the monkey.
El Capitan and later will add a Recovery partition and will do two things: to previous versions of Disk Utility it will simply say the whole El Capitan partition is incompatible and to later versions of Disk Utility it will throw up warnings if you try to delete the hidden Recovery partition or restore it to a non GPT drive.
The process for 10.13 and 10.11 was the same.
1. Create a GPT formatted USB flash drive installer using the "createinstallmedia" executable (search online)
2. Use Restore in Disk Utility to restore the USB drive to the OmniBoot, it won't warn you or complain
Done, you have a bootable 10.13 or 10.11 installer on your APM OmniBoot.
Then;
1. Install the OS onto a GPT drive
2. Once complete, boot to the El Capitan installer (even if you installed High Sierra)
3. Open Terminal and use
to find the drive and partition number of the associated Recovery HD (ie: disk4s3)
4. Take the drive number of the Recovery HD and apply this command
5. Confirm that the process initiates and completes
Now you will be able to use any Disk Utility to restore the installed OS (10.11 or 10.13) partition to the APM drive!
That was it!
I have tested multiple times to confirm it will boot my Mac mini G4, 2009 Mac Pro, 2016 MacBook Pro and 2011 MacBook Pro through either FireWire or USB!
It's a great feeling to go from a blank drive to a fully installed and setup Live install in ten minutes! You don't even have to mess with booting the installers if you just want to restore the Live installs. I achieved the ten minute swap with my Mac Pro. I put a blank SATA SSD inside the Pro and booted to my normal High Sierra install. I plugged in my OmniBoot, then chose to restore my 10.11 El Capitan Live partition to the GUID partitioned SSD. Within ten-minutes I had put the SSD into my MacBook 2011 and booted into my familiar desktop, skipping all setup and configuration. My apps and settings are just like I left them and really that is what this was all about.
When I finished testing El Capitan, I booted via FireWire to the OmniBoot on the Macbook Pro 2011. I opened the High Sierra installer, went to Disk Utility and restored my Snow Leopard install to the internal SSD overwriting El Capitan. In about 15-20 minutes, I was booted into 10.6.8 with all updates and configs ready to go!
I'm not sure how many people are interested in this or have similar solutions but I'm quite pleased with the scope of such a clean and simple setup. Zombie at least made it clear in his thread that there was a desire to have such flexibility (although his is a lot more ambitious for my capabilities and limited knowledge) and I hope that this encourages others to add this to their toolbox to make the hobby this much more enjoyable.
EDIT Guys, don’t put a /, \, or . in your hard drive name 🤦🏾♂️ I’m removing the periods from the point version names. I broke a Unix rule that even I knew.
![Screen Shot 2024-02-02 at 7.42.38 AM.png]( "Screen Shot 2024-02-02 at 7.42.38 AM.png")
One drive to boot almost any Mac for purposes of service, restoration or general fooling about that we are inclined to do.
It sounds simple but, as somebody that has repaired hundreds of Macs, I wanted a bit more.
No fewer than a hundred times (all the way back around 2007-2011) I performed this procedure:
Boot from a CD or DVD, select installation, wait, restart, endure the same perturbing dooo-do-do music AGAIN, speed through the "setup" checking "don't share my information, don't ask where I live, leave me alone" etc, booting to a fresh desktop as spotlight whirs into overdrive, warnings and request windows pop up, the mouse speed isn't right, sleep settings are inconvenient oh, and to top it off, ten restarts to get Java and other components up to date.
What if all I wanted to do was check the compatibility of a certain application? More recently, yes in 2023, I've had to install on multiple machines just to see how they perform in Adobe apps and certain games. Especially with games, this means inputing whatever keys for registration and sloughing through the tutorial and settings of the game again and again. Do you want me to quote the thawing scene from Halo:CE? I could 😅
What if I could have installers for multiple Operating Systems on the same drive as live Boot partitions that are preconfigured and ready to drop onto any disk and boot?
Thanks in part to this thread by @ZombiePhysicist , I finally committed to concluding my long-fought cause.
This is where it began around 2009-2011. I pulled a failing hard drive from a customer's Mac but decided to at least get some use out of it. Turns out I am still booting from it almost fourteen-years later.
While this worked in general, it normally required turning some screws. I would often remove the internal drive from my MacBook, place this inside, boot and install through Target disk mode to another Mac, or take apart the PowerPC Mac and install to the MacBook via Target Disk.
As easy as it sounds, it wasn't always simple. Tiger still required a working optical drive as well.
The first order of business was to purchase a bus-powered FireWire drive. Second, it should also have USB for ease of use with non-FireWire configs. Lastly, USB 3 at least would easily achieve maximum speeds with 2012 and later Macs without adapters etc.
The other reason for USB is that many Macs simply don't have FireWire. I know there is a Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter, I have one, but that immediately excludes my Polycarbonate MacBook. Having at least USB 3 makes it far more convenient to boot into with such models as my 2012 MacBook Airs and indeed the later models that only have C ports.
Thus, this Sony drive (which seems to have been unpopular in the US) checks all of the boxes. It's pocket sized, it's shown currently without the protective rubber (that also seals the ports), and is entirely bus-powered. I got a 500GB and I'm not sure if it was offered in any larger capacities. From around 2011.
Which Systems do we need to boot every Mac?
Without getting greedy, I figured a simple goal was to encompass the earliest Macs with FireWire to the last. Add to that the last Macs capable of booting High Sierra. (I don't want to begin to mess with Mojave or later for this project)
So how do we capture every early FireWire Mac and all High Sierra capable Macs?
Tiger is a start. 10.4.11 has a pretty simple requirement. It turns out that EVERY Mac that has FireWire is capable of booting 10.4.11 minimum. That is to say, if it has FireWire, it can at least support 10.4.11 or higher, no question about it.
Leopard is generally the bridge from PowerPC to Intel. It's not necessary in this scheme for these reasons: There is NO PowerPC Mac that requires Leopard to boot and there is NO Intel Mac that can boot Leopard but cannot boot Snow Leopard. However, the fact that it does add capability to the PowerPC platform that would otherwise be missed and it allows a bit more cross-compatibility with later applications, I'm throwing it in just for convenience.
Now we leave the world of PowerPC and focus on Intel.
Believe it or not, there are some Intel Macs which cannot boot beyond Snow Leopard. To avoid leaving out these early models of Mac mini and MacBook, and to maintain Rosetta capability in general, I'm including 10.6.
Lion would be next in line but I've concluded that there is no model of Mac that is capable of booting Lion but incapable of booting El Capitan! Therefore, anybody that survived the 10.6 Snow Leopard cut will be accommodated by El Capitan.
Finally, to the remaining models as a sort of freebie: Any mac capable of going beyond 10.11 El Capitan is capable of running at least 10.13 High Sierra. High Sierra is the last stop for complete 32bit support, it's a fast and generally stable system, and it bridges over to the new APFS format offering even better capability to solid-state systems or playing nice with all subsequent systems (It currently dual-boots on my APFS-formatted NVME with Sonoma on another "volume").
So with the following; 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.11, 10.13, I'm capable of booting every Mac that has FireWire as well as most models going up to mid-2018!
Next, compatibility on the Mac side.
Only the last PowerPC Macs are capable of booting from GPT disks. To maintain the most compatibility with the oldest (and therefore most difficult) systems, I would have to prioritize the APM table. Can Intel Macs boot from this? Can you create installers on APM?
Yes. No.
Apparently, Apple didn't get around to removing APM boot compatibility before switching to ARM64 and I have no way of knowing if even THAT has support. If you use APM, you will maintain compatibility going back to as far as 1987 when it was introduced! I just confirmed booting an APM High Sierra install on my 2016 MacBook Pro via USB.
Then comes the fun of putting Installers and Live partitions onto the APM drive.
Let's get to it.
10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 disk images and Live boot disks were easy. They do not have any checks or protection when using the restore function. I can't actually recall if 10.6 allows installing onto an APM drive but if so I just installed 10.6 onto a GPT drive then restored that installation to the OmniBoot. All of this was easily accomplished in Disk Utility
10.11 throws a wrench into the monkey.
El Capitan and later will add a Recovery partition and will do two things: to previous versions of Disk Utility it will simply say the whole El Capitan partition is incompatible and to later versions of Disk Utility it will throw up warnings if you try to delete the hidden Recovery partition or restore it to a non GPT drive.
The process for 10.13 and 10.11 was the same.
1. Create a GPT formatted USB flash drive installer using the "createinstallmedia" executable (search online)
2. Use Restore in Disk Utility to restore the USB drive to the OmniBoot, it won't warn you or complain
Done, you have a bootable 10.13 or 10.11 installer on your APM OmniBoot.
Then;
1. Install the OS onto a GPT drive
2. Once complete, boot to the El Capitan installer (even if you installed High Sierra)
3. Open Terminal and use
Code:
diskutil list4. Take the drive number of the Recovery HD and apply this command
Code:
diskutil eraseVolume jhfs+ Poopyscoopy disk4s3Now you will be able to use any Disk Utility to restore the installed OS (10.11 or 10.13) partition to the APM drive!
That was it!
I have tested multiple times to confirm it will boot my Mac mini G4, 2009 Mac Pro, 2016 MacBook Pro and 2011 MacBook Pro through either FireWire or USB!
It's a great feeling to go from a blank drive to a fully installed and setup Live install in ten minutes! You don't even have to mess with booting the installers if you just want to restore the Live installs. I achieved the ten minute swap with my Mac Pro. I put a blank SATA SSD inside the Pro and booted to my normal High Sierra install. I plugged in my OmniBoot, then chose to restore my 10.11 El Capitan Live partition to the GUID partitioned SSD. Within ten-minutes I had put the SSD into my MacBook 2011 and booted into my familiar desktop, skipping all setup and configuration. My apps and settings are just like I left them and really that is what this was all about.
When I finished testing El Capitan, I booted via FireWire to the OmniBoot on the Macbook Pro 2011. I opened the High Sierra installer, went to Disk Utility and restored my Snow Leopard install to the internal SSD overwriting El Capitan. In about 15-20 minutes, I was booted into 10.6.8 with all updates and configs ready to go!
I'm not sure how many people are interested in this or have similar solutions but I'm quite pleased with the scope of such a clean and simple setup. Zombie at least made it clear in his thread that there was a desire to have such flexibility (although his is a lot more ambitious for my capabilities and limited knowledge) and I hope that this encourages others to add this to their toolbox to make the hobby this much more enjoyable.
EDIT Guys, don’t put a /, \, or . in your hard drive name 🤦🏾♂️ I’m removing the periods from the point version names. I broke a Unix rule that even I knew.
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