rebuilding the media centre – part 2

prep work activities
the first thing i did was take an inventory of what applications i had installed on the mac. luckily i always keep copies of software, so i was able to have these handy for the rebuild.

i also copied any scripts and sundry data onto a separate hard drive. there was no need to backup our media as it was already on an external 1tb usb hdd.

uncaging the tiger
in my previous post, i was said it unable to perform a tiger target disk install via a snow leopard mac. so on a hunch i thought i would try to image the tiger disc 1 onto an external hdd and attempt to boot off it. thank goodness intel macs can boot off usb devices! for the first time superduper failed me and couldn’t a bootable image, any attempts to boot of it just caused the mac mini to reboot. luckily carbon copy was more than capable and got me over this first hurdle.

my tiger installer comes on two discs. so to save some time i would also image disc 2 onto a second partition of the same external hdd that had the tiger disc 1 on the first partition. i rebooted the mac mini and held down the ‘alt’ key to go trigger the boot manager, i selected the correct partition and the installation process began.

the first attempt to install didn’t work out, this was because the default install needs disc 2 which contains goodies such iLife bundle. the the installer refused to do anything with the disc 2 image that was on the other partition. this left stuck with a half installed tiger.

in the end i went for a customised install and unchecked the following packages:

• printer drivers
• language packs
• additional apps (iLife, games etc)
• fonts

this enabled me to finish the tiger install using only disc 1. once the os booted up, i opened up the tiger disc 1 installer and clicked on the install bundled software icon. this triggered the installer, but now that i had access to the underlying os, i was able to mount a disk image of tiger disc 2 (made using disk utility) and the installation finished!

and for my next trick, i will make a snow leopard appear
i didn’t bother applying any tiger related upgrades and security fixes since i would be upgrading to snow leopard immediately. i connected the mac mini and macbook pro together using the firewire cable. rebooted the mac mini whilst holding down the ‘t’ key.

this triggered the target mode, from this point onwards the macbook pro is controlling the mac. i stuck my snow leopard disc into the macbook pro and selected the installer. i was prompted for which drive to install snow leopard. and provided you select the right ‘Macintosh HD’ icon the target disk install commence. that or you’ll find your macbook pro has a fresh installed of snow leopard.

tip: pick the disk that has the firewire icon, if it looks like the hard disk you’ve pointing to the wrong image.

at this point you’ll freak out if you’ve never done a target disk install as the macbook will need to reboot (i think it goes into some kinda remote console for the mac mini). so save your work and get ready to use your iphone to surf the web for an hour or so.

once you’ve completed the setup new mac process (at the very end of the installation process) you’re now ready to reboot the mac mini.

patch up or patch out
and now onto the tedious task of applying patches, security update and re-installing software. the task is made less tedious if you keep copies of patches and security updates. you can download them all from apple support download page. this will also save on bandwidth instead of all the macs in your household downloading the same 100MB+ patch.

the end?
the only thing left to do was image the newly minted using superduper. i keep a sparse bundle disk image on the 1tb drive and also a bootable version on a rescue disk.

tip: before you image your primary hard disk shutdown all applications and have nothing running in the background. once i imaged a drive whilst my bit torrent client was running. sure enough each time i booted off the imaged drive i would have to shutdown the torrent client.

the only gotcha i found was application preferences in particular things like itunes. despite relocating the music library to the external hdd the preferences and configuration still reside on the primary disc. a minor annoyance, but soon resolved. i grabbed the files in the ~/Music/iTunes (various xml and itdb files, as well as the iTunes Library file) from my disk image of the mac mini before i re-installed everything. you take a before image right?

the same principle can be applied to application preferences, simply look in ~/Library/Application Support and and Preferences and copy what you want onto your newly minted install.