How do I burn .dmg to thumbdrive on PC

[JoesMorgue]

I don't have a running Mac yet, and I don't want to burn a ton of DVDs that don't werk.

Can somebody tell me how I can copy a DVD image to a memory stick on a PC?

I'm running Vista (shudder) and have magicCD installed

[naquaada]

This is not so easy. A .dmg is not only a DVD image, it can also be an archive for files or a backup from a complete harddisk with more partitions. A program which can handle .dmg DVD images is UltraISO.

[JoesMorgue]

Sorry, its an .ISO, not .DMG

[naquaada]

Then you must specify 'copy'.

If you want to copy the .ISO as file to an USB stick you only have to drop it on it :) But USB sticks are normally formatted in FAT32 format which doesn' support files with 4GB size. So you have to split the .ISO file in multiple parts, f.e. with WinRAR and depack it one the computer you need it.

If you mean you want to restore an ISO to an USB stick instead of burning to a DVD, so that you can boot from USB, I think this is not possible because a DVD has different boot routines than an USB stick. I created an bootable installation DVD on my Mac, but it needed some tricks, and this can't be done on an PC.

Could you specify a bit more you want to do?

[JoesMorgue]

I want to put iPC Live on a bootable 8 Gig (Currently NTFS) Thumbdrive and boot off of it. Instead of burning DVDs while trying to get OSX installed on my Compaq.

[naquaada]

Oh, I just saw that you're using an SATA DVD-ROM. This is often problematic. I recommend IDE for DVD-ROM and OS X boot drive. If you can't connect the DVD to IDE, maybe try it using on an USB port, at least for an installation.

Do you want to use a combined harddisk for Windows and OS X? I can only recommend seperated harddisks. It is possible that you can't change partitions in Windows on an drive which was used once in the Mac's Disk Utility, at least I had the problem using with Partition Magic 8. I only could change partitions again after deleting the MBR which means complete data loss. If you partition harddrives in GUID partition table (which is default for Intel Macs) it may possible that it's not possible to boot from them anymore, even after rewring the MBR. I had this problem several times.

60 GB are much too less for OS X. For testing purposes it may work, but not if you want to have fun with OS X. My system uses actually 57 GB virtual memory. I'm using complete different boot and data harddisks. You can take a look at my installation guide (http://www.infinitemac.com/f19/guide-creating-a-very-safe-os-x-system-t1234/).

[JoesMorgue]

My DEAD G4 (400Mhz) is 400Mhz, it was running with a 20 Gig (Tiger) boot, and a 10 Gig secondary.

I found a NTFS driver that let me access (read/write) my 500 Gig external that was formatted NTFS just fine.

Because of this, I figure that I will have full access to the 450 Gigs formatted NTFS, and a later question would be if Leopard can be configured so Vertual Memory, desktop, and possibly other things are not on the boot drive...(No, I will NOT try to put them on the 1.7/1.8TB Netwerk)

[naquaada]

Tiger was needing less harddisk space for the operating system and because of this maybe less pace for the OS itself. A PPC system may be handle the memory different, too. I don't use Windows anymore, only OSx86, so I can format my HD's completely in HFS+... 2.32 GB in one computer (of three).

I don't think that the Live DVD of the iPC image would work on AMD because iPC is mostly written for Intel. I had a lot of problems on my nForce 4 system with that image. You also need to add the board manufacturer and name. The gfx card is onboard, right?

[JoesMorgue]

OK, I'm hooked.

I WANT Leopard on this machine...What do you recommend? I will download it, burn it and try it EXACTLY as you recommend.

According to Compaq I have:
Iris8-GL6 Bios simulator
Athlon X2 (B) 4450e 2.3 GHz (45W)
2000 MT/s (mega transfers/second)
Socket AM2
GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 chipset
3 GB installed memory
PC2-6400 MB/sec
240 pin, DDR2 SDRAM
Integrated 10/100 Base-T networking interface
USB 2.0

Link: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01237538&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

I know this will be at my risk, NON-Mac HDs will be turned off during installation process to protect other data.

Please provide links to downloads so I can be sure I'm getting what your recommending. Off-site is acceptable if it makes you feel more comfortable.

[naquaada]

Important for an OSx86 installation are cpu, gfx card and motherboard. One the motherboard you have to know the chipset, the audio chip and the network interface.

Your mainboard is: ECS MCP61PM-HM
Chipset: nForce 430
Audio: ALC888
Ethernet: Realtek RTL8201N

Luckily I can say you that every onboard component is supported :D Your chipset is supported by AppleNForceATA.kext, ALC888 Audio are some variations available I think. The RTL8201 chip series was often problematic for some users. I have in my microATX-board (Fujitsu-Simens OEM board, see Black µMac in my signature) has an RTL8201CL chip. It was working fine for internet, but when there were long file transfers in the network the computer could crash. But now there's a new driver, nForceLAN, and this works perfect with my chip, I could even transfer a 7 GB image.

I don't know about the onboard gfx, but the nvidia 6xxx series isn't very well supported and normally onboard gfx isn't very nice. I had to exchange all gfx cards of my systems <sigh> because the were too slow for Quicktime 7.6 and I compared a lot of gfx cards before buying a new one. I found at least the ATI Radeon HD2600XT. This thing isn't the newest and maybe not the most powerful thing, but it only consumes 50W power, a Radeon HD4870 can use up to 285W, it's crazy! Faster nVidia gfx cards aren't better. Very good is also that there are various heatpipe versions out there, the one from Gigabyte is only one slot wide. Perfect for microATX-boards like yours, you don't waste a slot. The costs on ebay are about 20-50 Euro. This HD2600XT is perfectly supported, Dual-Monitor up to 2048x1536 and TV-Out are working great.

With the images, hm. I can give you a mediafire link for the XxX 10.5.6 Final 2 image. This thing continues all files you need. On the other hand, I noticed that all 10.5.5 and 10.5.6 images I tested were slower than a Leo4All 10.5.3 to 10.5.6 update. I won't install a 10.5.6 system anymore, I'll install a 10.5.2 system and then update directly to 10.5.7 when the update is out. I'll write about my experiences then. But this doesn't mean you should try an installation yet. It is always good to experiment and make own experiences.

[norcimo]

The way I did was using an existing mac.

I copied the IPC-DL.ISO file to the desktop

I formatted my 8gig usb imation drive on the mac. 4 gig works too..on the regular IPC.

Using the disk utility, I restored the .iso file onto my USB drive.

Then I used OSX86 tools , "Install EFI/ run fdisk" on the USB drive.

Done.

My USB thumb drive has IPC on it, it boots up FAST, I can install IPC not spend time
with long periods of wait bootup time. great for experimenting on many PCs.

[stan123]

So you didn't answer him - I have the same problem. I downloaded the life iPC 10.5.6 version (iso file format). It's 6.7 Gigs. I bought a USB flash drive of 8 gigs to run the live version from the USB. Is that possible? if so, how?

ImgBurn and MagicISO can only burn iso files to DVD. I don't have a dual layer DVD burner. So, how can I run it from the USB? copy paste the extracted files will not work because I don't have a boot section defined on the USB...


Thanks!

Josh.

[thorazine74]

I think what he is asking its a really hard task, I think you need to do at least these steps:

1) Repartition the USB Flash Drive: you need a MBR format partition style and an active partition with a standard bootsector; most drives dont have this format by default.

2) Create and format a partition as HFS+

3) Dump the contents of the installer: its its ISO it should be not that difficult but its DMG it can be.

4) Make the USB Drive bootable with Chameleon: for this you need the manual installation as the install package only works in Mac.

For 1) I think you cant do that with windows, at least with Disk Manager, maybe with command line. I think third party partition tools like Parted Magic will let you do that.

For 2) Parted Magic lets you create HFS+ partitions but they are not recognized by OS X Installer. You can also format discs with HFS+ format with MacDrive but I've never tried that. At worst if you can boot any DVD installer you should be able to format the partition from there using Leopard's Disk Utility.

For 3) depends if its ISO or DMG. For ISO any program that understands HFS will let you extract the contents of the ISO to the USB Drive, but I'm not sure if they will lose some of the Mac-specific attributes. For DMG I think IsoBuster supports that too, also MacDrive can mount DMG files in Windows. I'm not sure if simple extraction will work but it probably should.

For 4) you have to use some third party tools to a) copy the boot0 file to the Flash Drive's MBR; and b) copy the boot1h file to the Flash drive's partition boot sector. For a) I dont know of any tool that can do that, maybe some generic MBR Backup/Restore program will do; for b) there are versions of dd command line for windows (dd.exe) but I've never used them; Third step for chameleon installer is just copying the boot file to the partition's root but that should be just plain copy even by drag and drop...

Hope this helps, keep in mind that I've never tried this so I could be wrong about some of the steps.