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How to configure an 'All-Purpose' USB utility disk

M

m021478

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 23, 2007
380
5
I recently purchased an 8GB LaCie CurrenKey USB Flash Drive and I'd like to be able to configure the drive as a bootable all-purpose utility disk that I can use to boot my MacPro or Unibody Macbook Pro...

My ideal utility disk would be to create two partitions on the the Lacie flash drive - one would be used to install a bootable copy of Leopard on to use for a variety of troubleshooting methods; and on the other partition I would install a bootable copy of the latest version of Disk Warrior.

I tried doing this but quickly found out that even a trimmed down version of Leopard (without all of the printer drivers, fonts, X11, etc...) pretty much winds up filling the entire USB drive (when partitioned just once)...This definitely doesn't leave me any room to install any Leopard updates once the drive is up and running, nor does it allow me to create a second partition for a bootable copy of Disk Warrior.

At one point in the past I saw a program called Protogo by Micromat which would allow a very very minimal version of OS X on any drive you wanted, but I also read the fine print and noticed that their latest version owill work to create a bootable partition on all PPC & Intel Macs, except for the recently released MacBook & MacBook Pro that came out in October 2008. This happens to be the MacBook Pro model that I was hoping to use this Utility Drive on...

My specific questions are:

* Does anyone know of another way I can approach this dilemma?

* Is what I am trying to do here even possible?

* If in the end, it is possible if I just wanted it to boot my Mac Pro and not my MacBook Pro, how would I go about doing this without requiring that I purchase Protogo?

* Any other thoughts?

Thanks!!
 
Well I suppose another point of view would be to get a 16Gb flash drive to make it work- Amazon currently has a Corsair 16Gb for a surprisingly low $23 after a rebate here that would fit the bill and leave adequate space anyway.
 
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Obviously my information is old. last time I checked, a long time ago, we were only able to boot to a firewire drive.

Can anyone tell me when this changed, and if it works the same as booting to a firewire drive, it would really help and make my job alot easier.
 
DavieBoy said:
Obviously my information is old. last time I checked, a long time ago, we were only able to boot to a firewire drive.

Can anyone tell me when this changed, and if it works the same as booting to a firewire drive, it would really help and make my job alot easier.
Click to expand...

I believe the ability to boot from USB was introduced with Intel Macs
 
Can you restore a install disc to a thumb drive so that in the future you can install from a usb thumb drive. If you can, what am i doing wrong. I am simply restoring a install disc to the thumb drive using disk utility...

thanks for the help...
 
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