Unduly Noted

hello pirates!

So you found yourself with a huge .iso or .dmg of Mac OS 10.7 (or earlier). Maybe you made it yourself and lost the disc, maybe you downloaded it, maybe your DVD-Drive is broken (as every singe one of my macs turns out to be sooner than later).

On a mac: Open up disk utility, click on your usb or firewire drive and then go to the partition tab. Name your disc, in this instance we will call it Mac OS X Install.

Choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format.

Next make sure you click the options button and choose GUID (intel mac) or Apple Partition Map (PPC). Click Apply.

Now comes the fun part. In the left hand pane click on your newly named disk Mac OS X Install (After formatting is complete of course).

Click the Restore tab on the far right. Click the Image button next to the source field and choose your .iso or .dmg.

Next drag your newly formated Mac OS X Install icon (from the left pane or from your desktop to the restore field) and click restore.

If I remember correctly it will ask you for your admin user/pass.

If you get a failure at this step try to mount the image and restore from that. If that doesn’t work unmount it and try the original again. It has been flaky for me sometimes. A sure fire fix is to go to image in the menu and click “scan image for restore”. Takes a bit but lets you continue.

After it has completed eject the usb/firewire drive and take it to the mac you want to instal OS X on.

Plug in the usb/firewire drive and startup the mac. Right after hitting the power button hold down the “option” key. You will see a boot menu with your usb/firewire drive listed as a boot option. Click it and hit return. Install…

Reminder that PPC’s can’t boot from usb so you will have to use a firewire drive for this. Although I swear I have booted a Power Mac G5 from usb, its been too long to remember though.

Want to make a fully bootable usb or firewire drive of your current system that you can take with you? Or just for backup. Try:
Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper. Both great backup tools that are so easy to use they don’t need a post. Make sure you follow the formatting instructions at the top of this post if you want to make the drives bootable with these 2 programs.

This happened soon after the 10.5.6 update came out. Having a stupid moment and not testing the update on one machine I wen’t ahead and upgraded them all from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6. Then I started to notice that when a user would log out it would put up the gray kernel panic screen (reboot your computer by holding down the power button in several different languages). A few solutions. The problem was in 2 folders, the frameworks and the fonts folder in ~/Library (thats /Users/username/Library). If they are deleted you can logout fine. In 1 case that would not fix it so a removal of the entire /Users/username/Library folder did the trick. Don’t worry, when you log back in 10.5 server will repopulate that folder for you.  I did it from the terminal on the server before the user logged in. Just cd into the users directory and type:  sudo rm -r Library
There are some server side tools to mass delete this, or you can just write an automator script to run at logon.

I noticed this problem soon after one of the 10.5 upgrades. Running deepfreze on the macs that were bound to a 2003 AD server. These macs were also dual boot with XP but it doesn’t matter if you have a single boot setup the problem still occurs. After a few days the mac would unbind its self from Active Directory (or Open Directory if you are running 10.5 server). Apparently the mac needs to update the trust account password with the server. So every few days it changes it, but after a reboot deepfreeze of course reverts to the old file making it a bad trust and forcing you to rebind.

Without further ado….

on the UNTHAWED macs….

1. login locally

2. unbind from the directory (you have to unbind or it won’t work)

open terminal and type the following (hit return at the end of each line)

sudo rm -R /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService

sudo dsconfigad -passinterval 0

3. rebind to the directory

4. in the terminal again  (hit return at the end of each line):

sudo cp /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/ActiveDirectory.plist ~/Desktop

sudo chmod 777 ~/Desktop/ActiveDirectory.plist

4. now open the new file on your desktop in textedit called ActiveDirectory.plist

look for this…

<key>Password Change Interval</key>

<integer>0</integer>

Make sure it reads 0  <—yes that is a zero

if it does……

5. freeze and reboot

this essentially is telling the mac never to change the trust account password.

remember…when you run some of the commands you might not get a confirmation

This was a bear with my macs and an 10.5 open directory server with deep freeze on the clients. I finally removed DF and just used proper group policy restrictions (which I recommend over deep freeze for a lab setting any day). But i revisited the problem when a colleague had the same problem.