C[omp]ute

Reinstalling OSX via Linux

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2012 05:04:00 -0300

Pauli's Mac seems to be dead, but we've got hold of another, much more recent
MBP that "probably just needs OSX to be reinstalled".  It powers up, but
doesn't boot.  And there are no disks.

So I downloaded a torrent from PB, but had problems mounting the dmg file on
Linux (or an image created from it - see below).  As far as I understand it, a
dmg file is a compressed HFS+ file system, and an OSX install includes an ISO
image in a directory of that FS.  So you need to mount the FS, find the ISO,
and burn that - which is tricky if the FS won't mount on Linux (it's not clear
if the problem is Linux, or me).

But the second attempt using, I think,
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6823078/Mac.OSX.Lion.10.7.2-ADDiCT
was more successful.  That is a xar archive, rather than a dmg file, and you
can unpack it with xar from http://code.google.com/p/xar/

Unpacking showed a directory called InstallMacOSX.pkg, which included
InstallESD.dmg, which is a dmg compressed ISO image.

I then uncompressed InstallESD.dmg using dmg2img from
http://vu1tur.eu.org/tools/ which generated a "real" ISO.  Finally, I burnt
that to a DVD using cdrecord.  The MBP then boots from that and installs fine
- although it's just very slow compared with a Linux install (I don't know if
that's a real difference, or just because there's little feedback and long
periods of nothing but a spinning icon, or because I'm spoilt by recent
installs to SSD).

And I don't think the above is particularly illegal (the MBP would originally
have come with install disks), except that perhaps I have a more recent
version of the software than the original (I did try with Pauli's old disks,
but it wouldn't boot from those at all - I guess they were much too old).

Of course, it would all be much easier if we had a working Mac or the original
disks.

Andrew