Sorry but bootable CDs are a bad idea nowadays.
Really, anyone still using CD/DVDs to boot from needs to get with the times.
This is an interesting idea and something I'd like to do for my daughters' laptops. Although I run Snow Leopard they're both 10.5.8 from our Family Pack, originally 10.5.1. I have purchased two SanDisk Cruzer USB 2.0 16 GB flash drives. Questions:
1. When I install the OS, is the flash drive automatically bootable or should I do something specific?
2. Am I correct to assume that, once I've installed 10.5.1 on the flash drives, I should be able to run the updates that bring them to 10.5.8?
3. At the point my daughters decide to move to Leopard, is the flash drive updatable?
4. Our Snow leopard is also Family Pack. Am I better off to make the flash drives Snow Leopard now and skip any update issues later?
5. Is there anything else I need to be concerned/cautious about?
ryck
Edit: This post was originally a reply to Virtual1 in "Disk Warrior 4.2 Question".
1. When I install the OS, is the flash drive automatically bootable or should I do something specific?
Immediately bootable. Intel only. I recommend installing 10.6 instead, since the OS is intel only it consumes only 1/2 the space. When the installer finishes, it blesses the volume. You can do it by hand from terminal but I don't recommend it, it's tricky. Saving space on the flash drive will be or will become a priority so may as well start with the best lead possible.
2. Am I correct to assume that, once I've installed 10.5.1 on the flash drives, I should be able to run the updates that bring them to 10.5.8?
You seem to be concerned that the OS will treat the flash drive differently. It does not. Behaves just like a hard drive. Just reads faster and writes (a lot) slower. I have also created bootable compactflash and SD cards. OS X doesn't care, as long as the firmware supports booting from the hardware.
3. At the point my daughters decide to move to Leopard, is the flash drive updatable?
I assume you mean move to snow. see (2)
4. Our Snow leopard is also Family Pack. Am I better off to make the flash drives Snow Leopard now and skip any update issues later?
That's my recommendation, go straight with snow since there's no reason for 10.5 (ppc) Snow doesn't actually care if you have leopard on the drive or not, it will instal onto a fresh formatted drive.
5. Is there anything else I need to be concerned/cautious about?
Everyone's always bickering about wear leveling and write cycles on flash drives, but I have yet to run into a flash drive with a worn out cell, and I use my flash drive to death. I think they're being sensational over it. Probably your #1 concern is losing the thing. Flash drives are so easy to lose. Don't have any information on one of them that's not somewhere else too. I keep my service flash synced with a folder on my hard drive in my home folder. I suggest you do the same. (my service flash is not bootable, I have a lacie rugged for that, 12 partitions, most bootable)
(you should also give a little note to the fragility of flash drives, we see people that have broken theirs from time to time)
I personally have a lexar fireflash as my main flash drive. I got it because the lanyard attaches to the cap, not the drive, and I tie that down to my camera pouch so it's impossible to lose the cap, and if I walk away from my flash drive the lanyard flopping around catches my attention, so I haven't lost a drive yet.
Flash drives are somewhat commonly available in sizes up to 256 gb. (for about $350) You may find those 16's unattractive soon and be looking to upgrade. Back when I got my fireflash 16, I was also considering a usb to SD card reader that was about the size of a flash drive, because at the time sd cards were cheaper and higher capacity.
Everyone's always bickering about wear leveling and write cycles on flash drives, but I have yet to run into a flash drive with a worn out cell, and I use my flash drive to death.
You may find those 16's unattractive soon and be looking to upgrade.
Thanks for the great info. Re: the above, I don't anticipate either will be an issue as I just want them to have more efficient maintenance than running from their DW disks, et cetera. Therefore there won't be much on the flash drives and they shouldn't be used too often.
They're already quite tuned into the idea of back-ups from my nagging, and they use both Time Machine and Super Duper cloning. I drove the point home with the old joke: "What's the difference between getting hit by a truck or having your hard drive crash without backup?"
Answer: "With the hard drive crash, you know you're dead."
ryck
Thanks for the great info. Re: the above, I don't anticipate either will be an issue as I just want them to have more efficient maintenance than running from their DW disks, et cetera. Therefore there won't be much on the flash drives and they shouldn't be used too often.
Just be aware that when you are booted from a flash drive the various cache files and virtual memory swapfiles will, of necessity, be on the flash drive as well. Five GB is a reasonable minimum to allow for these files and potentially even more depending on what apps and utilities you are running. Not only will they eat a lot of space on the flash drive there will be a substantial amount of I/O to the drive, so there will necessarily be a lot of activity.
The DVD version of DW uses a special version of OS X that suppresses the use of Virtual Memory at the expense of substantially slowing the execution of DW.
Note to Moderators:
I wonder if this should be moved and become a separate thread "Installing System on Flash Drives", starting with my query Thurs May 13. It's off topic from the original and I should have thought if it at the time. Sorry.
Back to Virtual 1
Should the system install be done the way a person would install it on the computer's main drive (i.e Boot from the Snow Leopard disk)? I didn't and I wonder if it's been the cause of some difficulties.
I had my machine booted and used my Disk Utility to erase the Flash Drive. I then inserted the Snow leopard disk, and opened it to install on the Flash Drive.
After the install I shutdown but my machine would not reboot on its system. Instead it booted to an icon of the Snow Leopard disk and an icon of my Time Machine drive. The Dock looked like the dock for a new install. Neither my hard drive nor the Flash Drive were visible.
Edit: Additional Info - Although the Time Machine drive had the same name as my TM backup, it did not look like it. The icon was orange, with the Target Drive symbol instead of green with the Time Machine symbol.
I tried to use System Prefs to do restart from my drive but they wouldn't open. I could only choose a restart by doing a hard shutdown and rebooting in safe mode (shift key). Then the System Prefs opened.
On reboot I was operating from my drive and the Flash Drive icon was visible. It had Snow Leopard installed so I added Disk Warrior. I assumed I was now okay and shut everything down for the night, with the Flash Drive still in a USB port. The Snow Leopard disk was removed.
This morning on startup I got the wrong boot. It was the Dock that looks like a new install except there was no boot drive icon. There was only the Time Machine drive. However the System Prefs could open and I selected the main drive.
On restart I got my drive and the icon of the Flash Drive. I dragged it to trash and when the icon disappeared, removed it from the USB port. I've done Disk Utility Permissions Repair (nothing unusual) and a Disk Warrior rebuild which reported:
"The original directory is damaged and it was necessary to scavenge the directory to find file and folder data.! ! Some files that had been lost or thrown away may have been recovered.
Comparison of the original and replacement directories indicates that there will be changes to the number, the contents and/or the attributes of the files and folders. It is recommended that you preview the replacement directory and examine the items listed below.
All files and folders were compared and a total of 15,514,080 comparison tests were performed.! ! • All errors in the directory structure such as tree depth, header node, map nodes, node size, node counts, node links, indexes and more have been repaired.! ! Disk: "Macintosh HD
Volume Information had to be scavenged from the file system journal! Location: "Desktop"! ! Folder: "16807Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.1.4.mpkg"! Repaired Custom Icon Flag! Location: "Macintosh HD/Users/myname/.Trash/Recovered files/""
I'm now hesitant to try the Flash Drive in case it's the source of my problems. I'm also not anxious to go through another lengthy install without knowing if I messed up the very first step.
Thanks
ryck
Ryck, you've now got a separate thread.
Hope you get this all sorted!
Those are some worrysome problems you're having with that flash drive. I hope you didn't get a bad drive. I've had one drive arrive DOA on me, it was a 16gb that only the first 8gb were usable on. (it was not a format fraud, it was just plain defective[/i})
Do you have any tools capable of doing a disk [i]media verify? As in, not looking for io errors but instead writing semirandom data and read-verifying that the data was correctly written and re-read?
Also did you actually repartition the drive? It's usually ambigiuous when people say they "formatted" their drive, when in reality they only formatted the partition on the drive, and the partition table was untouched. To actually fully format a drive, you need to change the partition count from "current" to "one", click Options and select the schema you want, and then go to the one partition and set it to the type you want, and then click Partition. Since I format a lot of drives from two machines, I always have to go in there because it will always default to APS when booted off a PPC, and GUID when booted off an intel, and sometimes I have to format the drive to work in the other type.
If you didn't actually repartition it, I'd say try that and reinstall. I've NEVER had a problem booting off a flash drive on an intel, and it getting its marbles scrambled after you rebooted is NOT a good sign.
Tho all that being said, I still prefer the performance of an ext 2.5" HDD over the convenience of a flash drive, for bootable service. Much higher capacity and much higher read (and vastly higher write) speeds. I use a Lacie Rugged 500 currently. (fw400/800/usb2)
Do you have any tools capable of doing a disk media verify? As in, not looking for io errors but instead writing semirandom data and read-verifying that the data was correctly written and re-read?
I don't think so. However, if that's a handy tool to have I'm open to suggestions and my first preference would be to buy/support a product in the shareware community.
Also did you actually repartition the drive? It's usually ambigiuous when people say they "formatted" their drive, when in reality they only formatted the partition on the drive, and the partition table was untouched.
I didn't do anything to create a specific partition, on the assumption the drive would just be one big partition. I'll give that a try. Your suggestion raises another question.
Since the system takes up quite a bit less real estate than the drive size, is there any advantage to creating more than one partition?
Tho all that being said, I still prefer the performance of an ext 2.5" HDD over the convenience of a flash drive, for bootable service.
I do too and have my Super Duper clone on a SATA drive that I removed from my G5 when the Motherboard passed away. I boot the clone whenever I need to use something like Disk Warrior. However, these flash drives are just to give the girls a bit of technical support availability when they're away. With any luck, the drives may never need to be used.
ryck
Ryck, you've now got a separate thread.
Thanks, cyn. Next time I'll try to think before posting.
ryck
ryck,
. . . they both use . . . Super Duper cloning.
I am not clear about why DiskWarrior is not available on the SuperDuper! clones of your daughter's computers.
In other words, why are your daughter's unable to boot from a clone and run DiskWarrior?
I am not clear about why DiskWarrior is not available on the SuperDuper! clones of your daughter's computers
It is, but their machines are Powerbooks and their backups are on drives that they don't carry around. On a daily basis they both require their machines away from their drives so I want to give them portable access to help. It may be that they'll never need to use these drives but - you know how it works - like any kind of insurance.....if you don't have it, for certain you will need it.
ryck
Virtual 1: What size USB2 flash drive do you recommend if all I want on it is the normal OSX 10.6.3 (without all the extra languages) and Disk Warrior?
I'm running 10.6.3 on an 8Gb flash drive, but it takes some doing and is a nuisance to maintain.
You'll probably do best with no less than 16Gb.
ryck,
This is an interesting idea and something I'd like to do for my daughters' laptops. Although I run Snow Leopard they're both 10.5.8 . . . .
(snip)
3. At the point my daughters decide to move to Leopard, is the flash drive updatable?
(snip)
. . . their machines are Powerbooks . . . .
A PowerBook is a PowerPC and cannot run Mac OS X 10.6.x which requires an Intel Mac.
There seems to be some discrepancy between this Apple Knowledge Base article,
Starting from an external USB storage device (Intel-based Macs), and this Mac OS X Hint,
Easily boot from USB 2.0 drives on PowerPC Macs.
I do not have a PowerBook with USB 2.0 ports so I am not able to test booting it from a USB external drive.
A PowerBook is a PowerPC and cannot run Mac OS X 10.6.x which requires an Intel Mac.
Thanks. Of course, you are right. I said Powerbook when I should have said MacBook. The oldest of the two is a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo.
I guess my tongue got in front of my eyetooth and I couldn't see what I was saying. Or, as some I know might suggest, I'm just losing my grip.
And thanks for the links.
ryck
I'm running 10.6.3 on an 8Gb flash drive, but it takes some doing and is a nuisance to maintain.
You'll probably do best with no less than 16Gb.
The drives I have are 16GB and my first installation was sans the printer drivers, extra languages et cetera, which made the entire install - including Disk Warrior - less than 5GB. I haven't yet redone the install as GUID and partitioning as Virtual1 advised, but I imagine the size should still be similar.
How does extra drive space provide a benefit? Does it mean that it's better to create just one large drive-sized partition?
ryck
> How does extra drive space provide a benefit?
You can't install Snow Leopard on an 8Gb drive without jackassing it around, because the minimum space required for its installation exceeds 8Gb, but you can install it on a 16Gb drive hassle-free.
Edit: It also give OS X more room for "overhead."
> Does it mean that it's better to create just one large drive-sized partition?
Format your flash drive as per V1 (One partition will suffice unless you've got grander ideas.), install SL on it, and then add DiskWarrior and whatever else you care to add.
(By way of comparison, I've got 10.6.3 plus DiskWarrior down to 4.1Gb.)
[quote=artie505] Does it mean that it's better to create just one large drive-sized partition?
ryck
Yes. There is almost never a reason to partition drives with more than one partition. Some people still believe that they can organize things with This Here and That There partitions. The reality is that This Here quickly fills up and That There languishes with empty space. Organize things in folders, then the things you need to grow have the space and the things you don't need aren't hogging it. Partitions are really from the good ol' days when 5MB was a king's ransom and you had to enforce brutal limits. Now you just buy a new, bigger, drive when the old one is full.
I'd just like to point out that despite the axiomatic language in which it's presented, Starmac's assertion is just an opinion—one that's widely shared, no doubt, but one that's hardly universal.
Partitions are organizational structures, between drives and folders in magnitude. If one has no clear need for them, there's no reason to use them. But it's a tad presumptuous to declare preemptively that other folks' reasons for using them are ill-conceived.
Virtual 1: What size USB2 flash drive do you recommend if all I want on it is the normal OSX 10.6.3 (without all the extra languages) and Disk Warrior?
The system itself is actually pretty small, the problem you run into is if you plug it into a computer with a LOT of ram it can try to make some big swap files, and run you out of space in a very elusive way since those files are in a hidden place. (/private/var/vm/)
My bootable service drive is partitioned thusly:
APS 250gb 12 partitions:
1.0 Service Classic
11.5 Service Tiger
24.5 Service Leopard
1.0 Mac OS 9.2.1
1.0 Mac OS 10.3.4
1.0 Mac OS 10.3.4 Disc 2
3.5 Mac OS 10.4.6
7.5 Mac OS 10.5.6
---- --------------------- ^ all PPC in first 8 ^
5.5 Mac OS 10.4.7
9.5 Mac OS 10.6.3
13.5 Service Snow
R Service Data
That's leaving a bit of space on the "Service ..." partitions. All my service software is on Service Data which is not bootable. DW however is an exception, it refuses to launch from anywhere except the booted volume. You can see the huge difference in necessary space between 10.5 and 10.6. These sizes have been adjusted several times, and this is where I've settled. I didn't remove languages or do any other trimming anywhere.
So you should do ok with a 16gb for snow. But not for Leopard. I happen to have the Service bootables all auto login as root. Seeing as MOST of what I do on them would otherwise require continually authenticating.
Mac OS 10.6.3 has a good deal of free space right now but I am leaving the latest os disk with spare space for later as things get bigger.
Yes that's a bootable 10.4.7, it's (a universal) for the intels so I can A&I an intel that's still running 10.4.
More info on Service Snow: this one right now shows 6.63gb used, 6.74gb free, with no swap files. It doesn't have iLife/iWork or anything else large installed.
Mac OS 10.5.6 installer has less than a gig free.
Service Leopard has over 14gb used, 10gb available.
Thanks a lot for the tutorial. You do really good work. I now only have Intel Macs and Snow Leopard 10.6.3. Here's one more question: If I get a good sized flash drive (16GB or more), can I plug it into a USB2 port and then boot my Mac Pro from the Snow Leopard install disk and install directly to the flash drive rather than using Super Duper! or Carbon Copy Cloner? Can I then run the system updates by downloading from Apple's website and installing the latest Combo version?
You can't install Snow Leopard on an 8Gb drive without jackassing it around, because the minimum space required for its installation exceeds 8Gb, but you can install it on a 16Gb drive hassle-free.
But sometimes not. Yesterday, I returned both Flash Drives to the store.
I had done a system install, being very careful to prepare the drive properly (formatting, partitioning, et cetera). Installation was excruciatingly long and I thought "This is definitely a task where you want to do something else to kill time. Perhaps a camping trip." It was over four hours.
When the install completed, my screen went dark gray with the revolving clock hands, and then black with the beach ball. Finally I got the Snow Leopard opening screen and proceeded inputting the set-up information. That process too was extraordinarily slow.
When it got to a desktop view the icon was wrong. It was not the Flash Drive but an icon of my TM backup except that it wasn't green with the TM symbol. It was orange with the Target Disk symbol.
I did a hard shutdown and removed the Flash Drive.
I rebooted to get my machine's hard drive, inserted the Flash Drive, and selected it for a restart. It took almost 6 minutes to load the system and once again the icon was the incorrect-looking TM drive.
That's the point when I said "Life's too short", erased the Flash Drive three times, and headed for the store.
ryck
Booting from such a flash drive does take awhile, but I have no good answer to the format time. Did you do a low level format? sounds like it. Takes a long time for a 16gb flash drive to zero.
I also stumbled across a way to boot snow leopard on a flash drive, on a pc, now that's an interesting trick. Also extremely slow to boot. (7-10 min)
So it's not just the mac, it's the flash.
You could always go with a kanguru firewire flash drive. Too bad those are (still) sickeningly expensive and very low capacity. I don't understand why this is.
I'd just like to point out that despite the axiomatic language in which it's presented, Starmac's assertion is just an opinion—one that's widely shared, no doubt, but one that's hardly universal.
Partitions are organizational structures, between drives and folders in magnitude. If one has no clear need for them, there's no reason to use them. But it's a tad presumptuous to declare preemptively that other folks' reasons for using them are ill-conceived.
Nice interception, saved me from having to do extra fielding duty... thanks. [seems some of us remember the "partitioning wars" from the early MacFixIt days.
]
Anywho... I got inspired by this thread, so i went to Office Depot yesterday and blew a few Hamiltons on a Lexar.
Here are some details.
$ df -h /Volumes/FlashBoot
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk1s2 15Gi 7.9Gi 6.7Gi 54% /Volumes/FlashBoot
$ vsdbutil -c /Volumes/FlashBoot
Permissions on '/Volumes/FlashBoot' are enabled.
$ sudo du -hxd1 /Volumes/FlashBoot
Password:
288K /Volumes/FlashBoot/.fseventsd
16M /Volumes/FlashBoot/.Spotlight-V100
0B /Volumes/FlashBoot/.Trashes
0B /Volumes/FlashBoot/.vol
186M /Volumes/FlashBoot/Applications
3.9M /Volumes/FlashBoot/bin
0B /Volumes/FlashBoot/cores
0B /Volumes/FlashBoot/dev
0B /Volumes/FlashBoot/home
425M /Volumes/FlashBoot/Library
0B /Volumes/FlashBoot/net
0B /Volumes/FlashBoot/Network
4.5G /Volumes/FlashBoot/private
2.6M /Volumes/FlashBoot/sbin
2.1G /Volumes/FlashBoot/System
16M /Volumes/FlashBoot/Users
428M /Volumes/FlashBoot/usr
4.0K /Volumes/FlashBoot/Volumes
7.7G /Volumes/FlashBoot
$ time diskutil verifyVolume /Volumes/FlashBoot
Started filesystem verification on disk1s2 FlashBoot
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Checking extents overflow file
Checking catalog file
Checking multi-linked files
Checking catalog hierarchy
Checking extended attributes file
Checking volume bitmap
Checking volume information
The volume FlashBoot appears to be OK
Finished filesystem verification on disk1s2 FlashBoot
real 0m18.654s
user 0m0.019s
sys 0m0.014s
That verify came in under 20 seconds... not bad. It has been DiskWarriored and iDefragged to death though [and the time for "
sudo du -hxd1" was probably over 3 minutes actually.]
Anyway, once we measure all the hidden stuff too (seems i have a fat 4 gig /var/vm/sleepimage file to accommodate), i think trying this on a 8 gig disk would be way too tight.
i probably should note that (out of habit mostly), i kept
Swedish as well as English language folders on disk, so that might account (somewhat) for my items being larger than other folks.
When I installed Snow Leopard on my 8Gb Patriot Xporter XT (...faaast drive, by the way) I did the installation and much configuration on my FW HD and then cloned it over, retaining the installation on my FW (Edit: on a dedicated partition, of course) for future updates, etc; I don't remember how long the installation took to complete, but it wasn't out of the ordinary.
Your four-hour installation story is hair-raising, because not being able to do one I never gave any thought to how long a direct installation onto the flash drive might take. (Writing to a USB 2.0 flash drive is not a fast procedure [I'd hate to have to find out about USB 1.0.], and cloning SL to my flash drive takes 2- 3 times as long as cloning it to my FW.)
It took 20 minutes (with CCC) to clone it (It's 3.4Gb.), and it takes about a minute from the chime to boot my Early 2009 White MacBook/2.0GHz Core 2 Duo/4Gb RAM/OS X 10.5.7 (Build 9J61)...not too bad at all, but working with it once it's booted is excruciatingly slow.
I suggest that you follow my procedure if you still intend to follow through with your plan.
I've absolutely -0- idea what happened with your icon, but if that was your only issue I suggest that you just live with it. (You can always change it if it's only a matter of aesthetics.)
Following your lead...
Artie-s-Computer-4:~ artie$ df -h /Volumes/Sword\ Of\ 1,000\ Truths
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk1s2 7.1Gi 3.4Gi 3.7Gi 48% /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths
Artie-s-Computer-4:~ artie$ vsdbutil -c /Volumes/Sword\ Of\ 1,000\ Truths
No entry found for '/Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths'.
Artie-s-Computer-4:~ artie$ sudo du -hxd1 /Volumes/Sword\ Of\ 1,000\ Truths
324K /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/.fseventsd
15M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/.Spotlight-V100
0B /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/.TemporaryItems
0B /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/.Trashes
0B /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/.vol
63M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/Applications
3.9M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/bin
72M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/Clutter
0B /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/cores
0B /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/dev
545M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/Downloads
0B /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/home
8.2M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/kBase
423M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/Library
0B /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/net
0B /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/Network
164M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/private
2.6M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/sbin
1.6G /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/System
31M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/Users
359M /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/usr
12K /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths/Volumes
3.3G /Volumes/Sword Of 1,000 Truths
Artie-s-Computer-4:~ artie$ time diskutil verifyVolume /Volumes/Sword\ Of\ 1,000\ Truths
Started verify/repair volume (filesystem) on disk disk1s2 Sword Of 1,000 Truths
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Checking Extents Overflow file
Checking Catalog file
Checking multi-linked files
Checking Catalog hierarchy
Checking Extended Attributes file
Checking volume bitmap
Checking volume information
The volume Sword Of 1,000 Truths appears to be OK
[ + 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..70%..80%..90%..100% ]
Finished verify/repair volume (filesystem) on disk disk1s2 Sword Of 1,000 Truths
real 0m18.063s
user 0m0.121s
sys 0m0.032s
took 65 seconds to run.
I looked at
vsdbutil -c in Bwana, but didn't really follow what I read; can you explain why my answer differs from yours?
>
Anyway, once we measure all the hidden stuff too (seems i have a fat 4 gig /var/vm/sleepimage file to accommodate), i think trying this on a 8 gig disk would be way too tight.In an extraneous e-mail from Ted Landau he mentioned running Snow Leopard on
either an 8Gb or 16Gb flash drive, so I knew it could be done on an 8, but I was close to tearing my hair out, what with not being able to get the installation small enough, until I remembered to disable safe sleep and trash /var/vm/sleepimage.
My installation is (quite obviously) totally stripped down, but I can carry my deuced Mac(hina) in my shirt pocket, with everything I really need, if I choose to do so.
(Your response to dk about partitioning is appreciated; I didn't care to get into that issue yet again.)
Booting from such a flash drive does take awhile, but I have no good answer to the format time. Did you do a low level format? sounds like it. Takes a long time for a 16gb flash drive to zero.
Formatting the drive wasn't the time consumer. I don't recall the time used but choosing the one partition and formatting GUID was only a matter of minutes.
The actual system install took all the time and it was done having booted from the Snow Leopard disk.
ryck
I did the installation and much configuration on my FW HD and then cloned it over, retaining the installation on my FW (Edit: on a dedicated partition, of course) for future updates, etc;
That is something that I could do as I have a clone on a FW hard drive. The only difference is that I use Super Duper.
but working with it once it's booted is excruciatingly slow.
And that's a worrisome issue. It makes me wonder if I should just bite the bullet and get a couple of those very small HDs that are firewire powered.
I've absolutely -0- idea what happened with your icon, but if that was your only issue I suggest that you just live with it. (You can always change it if it's only a matter of aesthetics.)
Perhaps so. It's just that I'm always troubled when something very oddball happens and it is there
for me to see. I start wondering "If that's what I can see, what has happened that I
can't see?"
ryck
In an extraneous e-mail from Ted Landau he mentioned running Snow Leopard on either an 8Gb or 16Gb flash drive, so I knew it could be done on an 8, but I was close to tearing my hair out, what with not being able to get the installation small enough, until I remembered to disable safe sleep and trash /var/vm/sleepimage.
Ah, right you are... it appears in the first comment here:
...where Ted replies to himself, to update the article. I had forgotten about that sleepimage tidbit. (wonder if i should bother deleting mine or not). I notice that cnet has wrecked the urls in our posts there too. Here is mine again:
That one uses Pacifist in a sneaky way, to install Leopard on a
2 gig flash drive!!!
[edit: i just did a regular (albeit minimal) install off the SL DVD, as opposed to either cloning or tricks with Pacifist.] I looked at vsdbutil -c in Bwana, but didn't really follow what I read; can you explain why my answer differs from yours?
It's just a way of
officially unchecking the "Ignore ownerships on this volume" checkbox. [i mostly threw that in for Virtual1, since it was just discussed in another thread (
upstairs).] You'll see it mentioned in that 2nd link as well.
I've absolutely -0- idea what happened with your icon, but if that was your only issue I suggest that you just live with it. (You can always change it if it's only a matter of aesthetics.)
I work with a lot of drives (as if the vs db above didn't give THAT away!) and so far I've seen about 8 volumes revert back to the default drive icon.
I've found that I get info on them, and they show their correct icon in the info window. I select it, copy, and then immediately paste, and it's fixed. and does not break again. I presume it's an issue with leopard vs sl icon storage.