Embarassing story:

I had an appointment to go on site and deal with shuffling around some users and computers at a company in downtown Boston. Unfortunately, when you go on site, a lot of the time you’re walking into a mess with little information about it. To make a long story short, I found that I had forgotten my Leopard install disk and spent about 6 hours doing something that could’ve taken me about 3 if I had been prepared.

So, since I learned my lesson about having all my software available for my consulting gigs, I thought I’d share how I plan on dealing with this: A Leopard install, a Tiger Install, iLife and iWork ‘09, a crapload of other installs for 3rd party apps..

…and one bus powered firewire drive to rule them all.

SO, in the future when you plan on spending a beautiful 80 degree day inside at your computer organizing all of your software (that’s sarcasm), Here’s how I suggest you do it:

1) Put the install disk of your choice in and open Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app).

2) Right click on the mounted install disk and “Get Info” to find out how much space the mounted image takes up.

3) Choose your hard drive in the left pane of Disk Utility and click the “partition” tab at the top. We’ll start with just a 2-partition scheme just so this post doesn’t take me 4 hours.

4) Set the first partition’s size to equal or greater than the size of the mounted install disk (Leopard 10.5.6’s disk is a little less than 8GB) and click “Apply”.

5) Switch over to the “Restore” tab and drag the mounted install disk to the “Source” field and then drag the partition you just created for it into the “Destination” field and click the “Restore” button. Now you can sit back for a minute while the data is copied.

Here’s what my *almost* finished product looks like:

Just go back to the “Partition” tab and click the “+” button to add a new partition every time you want to add an installer.