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The other day, I had to scavenge the 80GB Drive from my rev D iMac, so that meant reinstalling Tiger.  To avoid going through the hassle of Installing OS 9, requisite updates and XPostFacto, I looked through the OS X installation files, and found a very simple way to make a generic installation disc that'll work on any new-world machine.  I thought I'd share this information.

This is especially useful if you want to install Tiger on a new-world machine, but you don't have OS 9 (XPF won't work with OS 8.x).  If  you're in this boat, then you need to have access to another OS X machine to follow my tutorial.  However, it might be possible to adapt my instructions so that it would work from OS 9 or Windows, but I don't know specifically how (Offhand, MacDrive,  dmg2iso, and SheepShaver seem like potentially useful Windows apps.  The beta version of Disk Copy seems like a potentially useful Mac app).  Anyway, here goes:


•Use Disk Utility to make a DVD/CD Master image of your OS X Installation Disc (if you have the CD set, use the first disc).

•From the Install Disc, go to System/Installation/Packages.  Then right(ctrl)-click on the item OSInstall.mpkg.  From inside the Contents folder, open the file OSInstall.dist in Text Edit.

•Look for the following line:

var machineType = system.ioregistry.fromPath('IODeviceTree:/')['compatible'];

and change it to:

var machineType = 'PowerMac3,6';

•Be careful not to leave out the single-quotes and semicolon.

•Save the file, unmount the image, and burn.


That's all.  You can now Install OS X on any new-world machine without having to first Install OS 9 and XPostFacto.  Theoretically this should also remove the 8GB limitation, but I haven't verified that (I'm using the original drive, atm).  Be careful; some machines really need this!  Also, RW's probably won't work.