Make Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Fit On A Single Layer DVD

If you’ve got an older Power Mac, iMac, eMac or Powerbook that is supported by Leopard, and you’ve got a retail copy of Mac OS X 10.5 but your Mac doesn’t support booting from a Dual Layer DVD, the type of DVD that Mac OS X 10.5 shipped on. Even worse, many older macs don’t support booting from USB flash or hard drives. So what are you to do if you want to install Leopard on your older PPC Mac?

If you really want to boot and install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on your older PPC based Mac, then what we need to do is to take the original Retail DVD, make a copy of it, strip out any unnecessary files and then burn it to a Single Layer DVD (just your run of the mill DVD that you buy for burning home movies to).

1. If you have access to a newer Mac, insert the Leopard install DVD into its drive.

2. Once it has been mounted to the desktop, open Disk Utility.

3. Select ‘New Image’ and format it as a ‘Sparse Disk Image’ and make the size equal to 8.0 GB and name it something simple like ‘Leopard Image’ and save it to the Desktop.

4. After Disk Utility has finished creating your new disk image, select the name of it on the left of the window (whatever name you chose in step 3) and select the ‘Restore’ tab on the right.

5. Here we need to drag the Leopard Retail DVD partition name (look to the left side of the Disk Utility window again) to the ‘Source:’ field.

6. Then drag the sparse disk image you created in step 3 to the ‘Destination:’ field and click the ‘Restore’ button below.

7. Wait until the contents of the Leopard Install DVD are copied to the disk image. When its done, we’re ready to start stripping things out to make it fit onto a regular DVD.

8. Now we’ll use the Finder’s Go-To-Folder option to open a hidden folder on the disk image. In any Finder window, press Shift-Command-G. When you see the Go To Folder window open, type in “/Volumes/DISKIMAGENAME/System/Installation/Packages” without the quotes.

9. Delete any foreign languages that you won’t be using and all of the printer driver files. Don’t worry about the printer driver files, you can always download them from the manufacturer for your specific printer.

10.Empty the Trash.

11. After getting rid of these files, we want to delete the Developer Tools as well since most likely you won’t need them and they’re already taking up around 1 GB of space on the DVD. These can be found on the root directory of the disk image in the ‘Optional Installs’ folder.

12.Empty the Trash again.

13.Your disk image should now contain as much data or less than what will fit on a standard DVD.

14.Now we want to make another disk image. Click ‘New Image’ in Disk Utility and make another sparse image of 4.7 GB in size. This corresponds to a Single Layer DVD. Name this one something like ‘LeopardDVD.’

15.Once its created, guess what we’re going to do? That’s right! We’re going to restore the first disk image we created to the second one using the same method in steps 4 through 6.

When its done, you can burn the new disk image to a Single Layer DVD using Disk Utility.

This DVD can then be used to boot and install OS X 10.5 Leopard on older PPC Macs that don’t have a Dual Layer DVD drive built in. When installing Leopard, you MUST use the customize option in order to deselect the Additional Languages, Printer Drivers and Developer Tools. This will ensure that the installation will proceed normally.

Disclaimer: This information is only intended for owners of an orginal Retail Install DVD.