I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal
Installing Mac OS X is a fairly simple task to complete and can typically take up to an hour or more depending on the installation options you choose. However, you should review all of your options in the installer as many items are not needed unless you have a specific need for them. Installing any operating system involves choices, which we will reveal throughout this chapter. If you are reinstalling your operating system, just make sure to have a valid backup before you continue on with this chapter.
The Installation Process
Installing Mac OS X requires little of a user other than agreeging to the license agreement, known as an EEULA and being able to click on continue. Many of the choices available during installation can be left at their default settings. The system will simply guide you in many cases allowing you to click Continue or Agree at most of the dialog boxes and obtain a default installing.
But the power user knows better and wants to be up and running as quickly as possible. The power user wants to leave out any of the items from the operating system that they’re not going to use and the power user is going to want a level of control over what is on their system that can’t be had by doing a default installation.
Also, until the system starts the Checking Disk process, which it will do in order to verify your installation media, you can stop the installation and go back to the operating system you had before. Of course, if you reformat a drive going back to your operating system will no longer be an option.
Note: You can access Disk Utility while booted to the CD in order to partition your hard drive, but if you plan on using Boot Camp to install Windows onto a partition then you will need to leave your system with one partition.
The installation process takes users through a variety of steps to help choose which parts of the operating system to install. At most of the stages, you will be able to click on the default value and proceed without actually customizing anything. However, you will see a Customize button at many of the screens that can be used to
Note: Each version of OS X will have a slightly different installation process. This article is written for OS X 10.5. However, if you are using a previous version then while some of the screens will be similar do not expect them all to be the same.
Installing an Operating System onto an External Drive
When you install OS X you can choose to install it on any drive that is visible to your computer. This can be a USB jump drive, a FireWire hard drive or an Xserve RAID. There are a variety of reasons why you would use any of these as a boot medium rather than your internal drive. Whether the reason is portability, drive size, redundancy or performance, Apple has given us a lot of options by allowing the installation of the operating system on any medium the computer can access that doesn’t require special drivers.
• USB jump drive: Placing a customized and very trimmed down operating system onto a USB jump drive can provide you with the ability to have a quick and easy way to troubleshoot any computer in your pocket at any time. The size of a USB jump drive makes it a good choice for people just looking to
• FireWire: Firewire hard drives are becoming more and more inexpensive with each passing year. These portable drives can allow you to take your files with you anywhere. But they’re not as good for using as a full time operating system. They are great for carting around installers, using as targets for your backups and it never hurts to an operating system on to use for troubleshooting.
• Internal RAID 0: A RAID is a random array of independent disks, or disks that have been combined for a specified outcome. RAID 0 disks are particularly helpful with increasing performance and obtaining a larger drive than what is possible without using a RAID. Computers with an operating system installed on a RAID 0 will receive a slight speed increase, but if either drive fails then you risk loosing all of the data on the volume.
• Internal RAID 1: A RAID 1 disk set is also known as a mirror. In a mirrored disk set, if any single drive fails then all of the data is also located on the second drive. There is a slight reduction in speed for RAID 1 volumes.
• Internal RAID 5: Apple recently released a card that allows for using 3 internal drives to create a RAID 5 volume. RAID 5 allows for redundancy as is found with RAID 1 and a larger volume as is found in RAID 0 with an offset in the speed decrease.
• Xserve RAID: The Xserve RAID can be connected to a computer through a fibre cable and allows for a single volume size of up to 10 terabytes.
Once you have your drives ready to install onto you will want to choose whether to do an upgrade or a new installation. If you are coming from a previous version of Mac OS X or having problems with your existing installation then you will likely want to do an Archive and Install. If you are working on Mac OS X Server you will likely need to do a format prior to installation. Once you have chosen which of these you will be doing then click on the Next and get ready to customize your installation. At this point you will be able to click on the Custom… icon and choose which parts of the OS to install. Don’t worry, if you leave anything out that you later decide you would like you can always go to the installation CD and install it as a package manually.
Now, click Install and you’re off to the races.
