The Last Pickle

My Mac Book Pro has recently stopped going to sleep when it should. When I close the lid it sleeps away, when I configure the Energy Saver section to sleep it develops a case of insomnia. A visit to the Genius bar on Regent street did not solve the problem, so I elected for a full erase and reinstall. After a day of mucking around the going to sleep bit still seems erratic, so that seems like a fun waste of time.

Anyway here are the steps I used to backup and re install OSX Leopard just using a Firewire external HDD. I decided not to use the install DVD as I don’t fully trust the DVD drive to work all the time. And I wanted to make sure I backed everything up before manually re installing applications as I did not want to migrate the problem back to the new install.

1. You will need two partitions on the external HDD, one to hold the backup and one to hold the Leopard Install. The partition for the Leopard install media needs to be 8GB, and the one for your HDD backup obviously needs to be as big as your HDD. I use iPartition to dynamically adjust partitions, but I think Leopard can do it own its own now.
2. If you don’t already have one create a disk image of the Leopard DVD. Open the Disk Utility application, select the DVD in the left list and click New Image in the tool bar. Accept the defaults for the Image Format (compressed) and Encryption (none) and after a while you’ll have a DMG copy of the DVD.
3. Now we need to restore the Leopard DMG to the partition on the external drive, this will be a bootable partition because the Leopard media is bootable. Using the Disk Utility click on Restore in the right hand panel, for the Source select the image created above and for the Destination select the partition on the external drive. Click restore and watch it go.
4. Now backup your current HDD, grab the freeware copy of SuperDuper. This will let you make a fully bootable backup of your HDD on the external drive, the paid for version has other features such as scheduling backups but the free one will do for now. Follow the instructions for doing your first backup, their pretty simple.
5. Now its time to test booting from the two external partitions, shutdown and then hold the alt / option key when pressing the power button to restart. You should be presented with icons for options to boot from 3 different devices: Macintosh HD (the default volume name), your backup volume name and the Leopard install media. Select the backup volume and make sure you can boot from it.
6. Start the machine with alt / option pressed and select the Leopard install volume to boot from. You should then be able to do a full erase and install on the internal Macintosh HD volume.
7. Once the installation has completed you can keep the fire wire drive attached and pull files directly from your backup. If you then find you need to export some setting from your old install (such as doing an iCal backup) you can reboot into the old system, and export the settings to the internal drive ready for use in the new system.

Its not very complicated and really handy to be able to effectively run your old OS install after you’ve completely removed it from your internal drive.