32 Comments

How to Install Tiger on Your PC Without Wiping Windows ‘Non-Destructive’ Mac/Windows Dual Boot Installation

August 18, 2005 by in Tech with 32 Comments

Special thanks go out to ‘Stryder’ for this:

This guide will provide somewhat specific instructions detailing the process by which you may install Tiger using a disk image, without destroying your Windows installation. The process is simple, though a bit slow at times.

What To Do How to do It
Download the disk image. Decompress it. Get Tiger-x86.tar.bz2 via BitTorrent
Download a bootable ISO with the capability of writing a raw image directly to hard disk, and burn the ISO. Any reasonable Linux install or ‘live’ disc should do. Eg., Ubuntu Live CD, Mandrake Install CD/DVD.
Download a partition management utility Eg., Partition Magic. Just make sure whatever software you get can non-destructively resize and move partitions.
Resize partition(s) so that there is at least ~7 gigs unallocated space; Move any partitions existing partially/totally within the first ~7 gigs of the drive. This is simply to avoid overwriting your partition(s) and the valuable data within them. dd will only write as far as the size of the (uncompressed) image, so we are dodging its wrath. The process of moving big partitions with lots of data is very time consuming so be patient.
Backup your MBR. dd if=/dev/hda of=MBAbackupfile count=1 (replacing relevant portions according to your own needs/whims. Then write this file to a disc or upload it onto the net or another computer.
Write Tiger to your hard drive. dd if=tiger-x86-flat.img of=/dev/hda
Set up passwords in Tiger. Check out the OS. Use boot option -s. Then while in the text-mode console, execute ‘sh /etc/rc’ and run ‘passwd curtis’, ‘passwd deadmoo’, ‘passwd root’; these will have blank deafult passwords in this mode.
Restore/update the MBR. dd if=MBAbackupfile of=/dev/hda (this step is optional but desirable)
Recover Partitions There are a number of programs that can do this, mostly commercial. Acronis produces one such program. I have come across a free utility for this, but it didn’t work for me for some reason…. Anyway, this may take a (long) while if you didn’t restore your MBR.
Install bootloader. Not hard to find. Again, Acronis produces a commercial bootloader but personally I’d rather use LILO or GRUB, all other things being equal.
Relax and have fun, you are done. You can now dual-boot into OS X and Windows.

  • http://ralph.n3rds.net/index.php?/archives/72-Mac-OS-X-on-x86.html Ubuntu Linux Blog of ralph

    Mac OS X on x86

    It was barely impossible to not come across some of the recent blogs and webpages about installing OS X on a regular x86.
    For all people interested in running OS X on their x86 machines (be aware, that you your processor needs at least SSE2) I’ve som…

  • Nobody

    “Recover Partitions” You can use linux fdisk and take down the cilinders where partitions start and recreate them before dd, or you can use before and after a tool provided with partition magic to edit manually the partition table.

  • Will Gamble

    actually a question, I know you need at least 7 gigs of unalocated space for the image, but if I create a larger partition can I use the rest of it to store files under OSX I have heard about a problem with this.

  • http://www.jbtwo.com jonbusby

    Yeh, I did this and for some reason got the ‘error loading operating system’ problem once i rebooted after a couple of times… eventually I fixed it by getting the ultimate boot cd and booting the window parition using on of the included boot managers…then ran partition magic which told me my LBA and CHS values were not identical.. and it fixed it…

    is this why you backup your mbr in your guide?

  • Stryder

    Will,

    I see no reason why you could not create a new partition from unallocated or free space and simply format it for use with OSX. I have not done this though. As for extending the partition that OSX is in, I imagine you could do this using a PM-type utility that can handle Mac partitions, just keep in mind that when you’re clearing space to write this OSX image to disk, you are not making a partition for it (or if you are, you’re wasting your time), since the whole partition structure is built into the image.

  • Stryder

    Jon,

    I figured it could be done manually but I didn’t really trust myself to properly restore the partition table by hand. And not surprisingly, your experience suggests that “Nobody”‘s method is oversimplified, though ultimately your process worked and was probably quick, and so seems quite valid and rather useful.
    Backing up and restoring the MBR serves two purposes: one, to allow you to have full confidence that you can recover your valuable partition(s), and two, to speed up the process of partition search if you are fixing the parition table automatically, since the MacOS partition is at the beginning of the drive.

  • Stryder

    UPDATE/ADDENDUM/CORRECTION

    I’ve noticed that Darwin has its own multi-boot-loader, something which I and others have failed to notice or mention. So it is redundant and hence unnecessary to install another one! In other words, don’t bother with LILO etc. unless you want to.

  • ron

    thanks for all the insight guys. will try doing this tonight…

  • http://detersmart.dk Mikkel Malmberg

    Is it possible you could clarify the Recover Partitions part further?

    Thanks!

  • z

    Can u install mac on a separate harddrive and not in a partition?? Because i have tried and nothing comes up, maybe because i just burned the .img file with Roxio.?? Any ideas?

  • http://www.stasis.org/?p=5 Stasis » MAC OS X on Intel PC Hardware

    [...] How to install Tiger on your PC without wiping windows ‘non-descructive’ mac/windows dual boot install [...]

  • http://rix0r.nl/blog/archives/28 RiX0R blogt » Blog Archive » Look ma! No PowerPC!

    [...] I had help from various sites. Below I will detail how I did it. [...]

  • Tommy

    is the partition for Tiger has to be at the begining of the drive?
    will Tiger use the remaining space if i have more that 7Gigs unallocate free space?
    Thanks for any answer

  • VIshnu

    can u please tell me what do u mean by ‘ dd’

  • Mahmoud

    Is it possible to Install this MAC OSx86 on AMD Athlon XP 1800+ ???
    My pc configuration is AMD processor 1550 Mhz with built in sound+Vga+Lan and I have another AGP ATI Vga, would this work in my PC? don’t I need any other Devices? and what is the SSE2 and SSE3 ???
    and how can I boot it on my Hard Drive if I dont have DVD Drive?
    thanks

  • Takias

    Is it possible to install Tiger on AMD X2 4400?My PC configuration is AMD X2 4400 2,4 Gh, MSI K8N Diamond SLI, Gigabyte 7800 GTX, 2 GB Geil DDR 400,Audigy 2 ZS, 2*250 Western Digital on RAID 0, 2*120 Seagate on RAID 0.

  • wty4ka

    the only AMD processors that mac is guarunteed to run on is the AMD s939 3500+ and the 3800+ with the VENICE architecture

    .

    the VENICE is the only AMD architecture to support SSE3 and it only supports 11 out of the 13 functions

    the VENICE core offers the best AMD compatibility

  • tiimey

    is partion magic 8.0 by powerquest able to non destructively resize partions?

  • Travis

    Hey, I found something better. Bittorrent or any torrent client can be slow even on a very fast connection, so go to http://www.filewatcher.com and use the FTP search for tiger-x86.tar.bz2 and there will be one result, click to download. Link works, just don’t know about the file integrity yet, is there a way to check if it’s valid? But do a virus scan anyway.

    This file will take some time to decompress and will not work on 9x/ME because FAT32 can’t handle big files like that.

    -Travis, aka uPlink

  • Danny

    Is it possible to use boot.ini instead of a program to boot XP and MAC ? I would think so but, I figured I would ask.

  • SaintLK

    Danny> Nope. Mac and Win uses different methods of booting. u need GRUB that does chain loading to replace the MBR when booting.

  • Bosch

    instruction suggests that tiger image file is right there on hd:
    dd if=tiger-x86-flat.img of=/dev/hda

    but how is that since im using Live CD. where do i pull the tiger from?

  • Howard

    Can I use my Compaq 6000 with P4 to do this and can I use this new os with all my mac software to run adobe stuff without issues?

  • http://www.aztekera.com/ Mazin

    Is it possible to dd with bs=512 to start writing mac immediately after the partition table, thus saving the tedious and/or dangerous step of finding all the partitions?

  • empthollow

    does the free space have to be at the beginning of the drive?

  • BDM.

    You are waisting your time because you’ll need to hack Tiger EVERYTIME you update it and I don’t think that PCs with OSX 10.4 can run iLife or Pro App – even iTunes !

  • bill

    Ok, I did what it told me to do and when I type dd if=media/apple/tiger-x86-flat.img
    of=/dev/hda (apple is the name of the external USB drive) it tells me permission denied.When I unmount the drive and type it it cant find the directory.I am using ubuntu live cd. How do I get thisd to work?

  • Globe Treader

    i DDd the img file on a unused partition on my hdd and then made it active
    upon rebooting i get a blank screen with cursor blinking on left top corner and a continously on hdd led. keyboard responds though and system is not hung..

    any pointers?

  • Tealsteam

    I was reading through the instructions, and im getting quite baffled does neone have a step by step noob version of the dual boot install?

  • Stryder

    Does anyone have a goos step by step for single OSX x86 install. Also, what’s a good source for updates?

  • Goozer

    What’s the deadmoo’s password? I did an error: I locked the system preferences and for unlock them I nedd the password. Excuse me for my bad english because I’m italian.

  • Nuno João

    please help me in this part:

    Download a bootable ISO with the capability of writing a raw image directly to hard disk, and burn the ISO.
    Any reasonable Linux install or live should do. Eg., Ubuntu Live CD, Mandrake Install CD/DVD.

    sorry for my bad english, im portuguese

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