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Install Snow Leopard over Network?

nightfly13

nightfly13

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 17, 2008
679
0
Ranchi, India
I'm running a MBP with an SSD in what used to be the optical drive bay. I have a SL DMG installed to a flash drive but it's giving me some trouble on another Mac I've tried to install it on. Spinning twirly ball at reboot trouble.

I could re-install the optical drive, but I was hoping maybe I can install over gigabit ethernet? I think I've read about this but I'm missing the correct search term I think.

Help appreciated.
 
Can try Firewire target mode to install the OS using the Mac Pro and its Optical drive.

Though I have a cheap external USB DVD drive I tend to use for a mass loading/burning on my iMac -- which I use to get around a finicky slot loading drive.

And also used it because the slot loading drive died after loading only a few hundred music CDs. Apple installed a new one, which is still fine for occasional use.
 
Thanks Sun Baked, but I don't really want to buy an external disc drive. Either way; it would be better/easier just to re-install the existing superdrive back in temporarily.

It seems that most installations of OS X without a DVD drive require you to have another apple computer spare with a dvd drive. I know there is remote install for windows but I've not had any luck with it personally.

I've used a windows 7 machine to rip OS X from the dvd to a USB stick but when booting up I get kernel panic ACPI errors, so wanted to see if I could boot over lan. macbook should support PXE so someone must have done this and there must be knowledge out there... I hope!
 
Well - I 'burnt' an image of the disc straight onto the usb stick, so assume the file system would have come with that? otherwise I'm not sure that it would even be able to boot from it at all? e.g. i put stellar phoenix file recovery .dmg onto the usb and that booted fine - file system on the stick was previously fat32 formatted by windows :s

If I need to format it first with a GUID and then write the dvd image do you know how i can do this from windows? As I said though this doesn't make sense to me as I thought the image contained everything?

thanks in advance for any help - I've literally wasted 2 days getting this to work. I've tried:

1. installing SL from USB
2. booting with tech tools on usb
3. booting with BUI 2.3.0 from usb
4. many wasted and failed attempts with supposedly mac/efi bootable linux dists on usb
5. stellar phoenix file recovery (boots but then it can only recover files - and both of mine are blank so this is no use)
6. and about 10 other similar things.
 
Look at your Mac OS X Installation manual, it tells you exactly how to do this under the 'Using Remote Install Mac OS X' section.

Here is a direct link to the PDF manual for Snow Leopard on Apple USA's website: http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Snow_Leopard_Installation_Instructions.pdf *Err realised you were having problems with this for Windows.

You can still use a bootable USB flash drive (or even USB hard drive), it sounds like you've gone about it the wrong way however, so try the instructions found here - http://www.maciverse.com/install-os-x-snow-leopard-from-usb-flash-drive.html

Alternatively for network installations there are these instructions (found quite easily by searching Google for 'Mac OS X installation over network' ;) )

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090317042911165 (10.5: Install (or boot from) an image over local network - dare say it should work for 10.6)

http://www.macgeekery.com/hacks/hardware/make_any_mac_a_netboot_server (Make any Mac a NetBoot server)
 
I've finally resolved this issue.

Re-downloaded a fresh .iso of Snow Leopard from bittorent and wrote this to a usb stick. Figured I've got the DVD of it anyway so have a license.
 
Your wrong, it's not stealing, I own a license and I own a Macbook. Possibly some kind of EULA breach Apple have worked in, but to be frank I'm not going to bother about this.

Re: "Malware" - classic 'poisoning of the well', from the ill informed. Think before you speak about something you don't know anything about - anyone can confirm the MD5 on the ISO to 'official' sources (not Apple but plenty of reputable blogs, etc) to confirm no malware has been added. I did this. Admittedly if someone was so inclined they could fake something and fake sources, but where this happens the files get identified and highlighted as such. On an Apple OS it's near enough to impossible and well worth the microscopic risk to get my laptop working again.

Apologies for an unpleasant tone but anti-P2P responses like yours always irritate me. Fair enough knock it [P2P], but at least do it from a position of correct facts and moral high ground - not just any and every opportunity that presents itself.
 
Just to note, there was a simple solution to installing over the network (sure it’s slower than installing from a disk or locally sometimes, but not slower than looking up the process, copying the disk to a USB stick, etc).

Look in your /Applications/Utilities/ folder for a program called “Remote Install Mac OS X”. Open in on both machines. Follow the instructions…

jW
 
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