eprigorodov / mkosxinstallusb

Linux shell script that creates USB flash drive booting OS X installer

mkosxinstallusb

Linux shell script that creates bootable USB flash drive with OS X installer.

OS X installer application contains a disk image "InstallESD.dmg" that can be used to create a bootable USB flash drive. The procedure is well described in the media, see references below.

This script automates process on Linux platform, doing essentially the following:

mkdir -p /mnt/OSX_InstallESD /mnt/OSX_BaseSystem /mnt/usbstick

# convert installer disk image to raw format
dmg2img "Install OS X <Version>.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg" InstallESD.img
kpartx -a InstallESD.img
mount /dev/mapper/loop0p2 /mnt/OSX_InstallESD

# convert base system disk image to raw format
dmg2img /mnt/OSX_InstallESD/BaseSystem.dmg BaseSystem.img
kpartx -a BaseSystem.img
mount /dev/mapper/loop1p1 /mnt/OSX_BaseSystem

# partition the USB flash drive, /dev/sdX
sgdisk -o /dev/sdX
sgdisk -n 1:0:0 -t 1:AF00 -c 1:"disk image" -A 1:set:2 /dev/sdX
mkfs.hfsplus -v "OS X Base System" /dev/sdX1
mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/usbstick

# copy installer files
rsync -aAEHW /mnt/OSX_BaseSystem/ /mnt/usbstick/
rm -f /mnt/usbstick/System/Installation/Packages
rsync -aAEHW /mnt/OSX_InstallESD/Packages /mnt/usbstick/System/Installation/
rsync -aAEHW /mnt/OSX_InstallESD/BaseSystem.chunklist /mnt/usbstick/
rsync -aAEHW /mnt/OSX_InstallESD/BaseSystem.dmg /mnt/usbstick/
sync

Usage: ./mkosxinstallusb.sh </dev/sdX> "Install OS X <Version>.app", where </dev/sdX> is a block device for target USB flash drive, e.g. /dev/sdb.

Known problems:

• High Sierra installers are not supported yet,
• Korean localization can be omitted due to Linux/hfsplus bug, see https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1422374

References:

• https://www.afp548.com/2012/05/30/understanding-installesd-recovery-hd-internet-recovery/
• https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/how-make-bootable-mavericks-install-drive-3475042/
• https://www.macworld.com/article/2367748/os-x/how-to-make-a-bootable-os-x-10-10-yosemite-install-drive.html

mkosxinstallusb's Issues

Writing to SCSI disk device is broken after merging #4

#4 contained some assumptions about the target device that make script fail when working with the USB drive (e.g. regexp that parses kpartx output).

High Sierra

I know that the readme states:

High Sierra installers are not supported yet,

But do you know of a manual way of creating the bootable USB?

Suggestion: Ensure USB disk is properly configured

This is just a suggestion.

In my case, I had used the USB stick for other stuff and was previously imaged with dd, so despite the stick being physically 8Gb, my Linux was only seeing it as a much smaller disk (2Gb). This caused issues later on when rsyncing the Packages folder onto the stick as it was running out of space!.

The solution for me was to do this to my stick before running the mkosxinstallusb script:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress
sudo sync

That made it be an 8Gb disk again.

Maybe mkosxinstallusb could incorporate this step before running sgdisk -o $stick_dev to make the process more robust for some corner cases. Something like this:

[...]
echo "\n# partitioning USB drive"
if [ -b "$stick_dev" ]
then
    for device in $(lsblk -lnp -o NAME "$stick_dev" | tac)
    do
        umount -l "$device" 2>/dev/null || true
    done
fi
dd if=/dev/zero of=$stick_dev bs=1M status=progress
sync
sgdisk -o $stick_dev
sgdisk -n 1:0:0 -t 1:AF00 -c 1:"disk image" -A 1:set:2 $stick_dev
sync
[...]

Catalina: The installer resources were not found.

The message occurs when making a bootable drive using Linux for Catalina. Any ideas?

List of files on the drive: filelist.txt

The installer fails if date is out of sync

HOW TO REPRODUCE:

1. Reset the Mac SMC, by on boot up holding the keys Command (⌘), Option, P, and R.
2. With a MacOS USB try to install the system.

RESULT:
The installer complains that it's unable to continue due to missing packages.

SOLUTION:
In readme.md indicate the fix:
"If the installer is unable to find the packages, in the utility "Terminal" enter (using two digit fields): date [month][day][hour][minute][year]"

REFERENCES:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7251878

I don't have a BaseSystem.dmg

Hi there,

I tried this with the El Capitan DMG downloaded from Apple. The file is named InstallMacOSX.dmg (not InstallESD.dmg, I have searched google for this file but the one offered by Internet Archive is just the same "InstallMacOSX.dmg" file I already have from Apple).

When I convert to .img and mount, I don't have a "BaseSystem.dmg" file in the mounted dir, just a InstallMacOSX.pkg".... what did I do wrong? I don't have access to a Mac running MacOS, so I can't get any "InstallESD.dmg" from a system folder.

Dependencies could be specified

In readme.md it would be nice having a list of required dependencies. They are:

• dmg2img
• multipath-tools
• hfsprogs
• rsync

Why removed the EFI partition?

After remove, the result image is bootable?