- #MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE HOW TO#
- #MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE INSTALL#
- #MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE PRO#
- #MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE PASSWORD#
- #MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE ISO#
#MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE INSTALL#
Whether you want to dual-boot your Mac, have to install the new macOS version on multiple computers (and don’t want to spend hours doing it), or need to reinstall the operating system on your Mac, a bootable USB installer has you covered.
#MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE ISO#
(In the above image the Virtual Machine was booted from a SpinRite Floppy Disk Image however it will also boot with the CD/DVD using an ISO Image or Physical Optical Media.)Īgain let me make this perfectly clear that if you choose to do this it is totally at your own risk and you have been warned!!!
#MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE PASSWORD#
The image above and below highlights the information comparing the output of the fdisk command and what needs to be set in the RawDiskN.vmdk file.Īlso note that you must unmount the target disk before starting the Virtual Machine and you also will be prompted for a password as the Virtual Machine is started. You can compare the information in the RawDiskN.vmdk file and see where the information in the above output is plugged into that file and then replace my output with the output from yours. To determine a couple pieces of information necessary in the RawDiskN.vmdk file I use the following command in a Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/).Īnd on my system the output was as follows: The attached file SpinRite.zip contains three files, SpinRite.vmx (the virtual machines configuration file), RawDiskN.vmdk (the virtual hard drive that will need to be edited to match your case use scenario) and SpinRite.nvram (the virtual machines BIOS that is set to boot the CD first.).Īnother word of caution is in order and that is Apple does not guarantee the BSD Name of the disk between reboots and therefore the configuration information within the RawDiskN.vmdk as far as the disk number may not remain accurate between reboots of the Host.
#MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE PRO#
Using my MacBook Pro which has a 120GB hard drive I booted using an external FireWire drive that had OS X 10.5 and VMware Fusion 2.0.4 and I manually created a virtual hard drive that pointed to the internal hard drive as a raw disk. I'm going to provide this following information strictly as a proof of concept however I strongly advise not running low level disk utilities such as this through a Virtual Machine on a Raw Disk and if you choose to ignore this then at a minimum make sure all User Data has been backed up and that the computer is connected to an Uninterrupted Power Supply and have nothing more than what's necessary to be running and do not use the computer for anything else during the process.
#MAC OS X STARTUP DISK THUMB DRIVE HOW TO#
I would greatly appreciate it if someone knows how to do this or could think it through. The issue is how to give the VM control over the internal physical hard drive rather than to let OS X have control over it. I can run VMWare off of an OS X virtual disk with no problem. I've seen some posts that are oriented towards people who are using bootcamp to run VMWare from a physical partition, but that is not my situation. I need to give Spinrite access to the physical drive, not to a shared folder or a single partition, but to the physical drive.
Its easy to attach external USB drives or internal IDE drives (CD ROM) to the VM, but the Fusion interface does not provide an option for attaching an internal hard drive to the VM. In order to perform drive repair and maintenance on an internal OS X hard drive, I would like to be able to:ġ) Boot off an external (USB) drive into OS X (which I can do, using a clone of a working OS X installation and pressing the Option key when booting, then selecting the USB disk as the boot disk).Ģ) Run VMWare Fusion 2.x (which works fine).ģ) Load a DOS VM and run Spinrite off of the CDROM drive (which works fine and can access any drive attached to the VM), andĤ) Give Spinrite (which is running in the VM off the USB drive) access to the internal physical hard drive on the Mac (this is where I need some instructions).