InstaDMG June 2012 Macbook Pros?

[jeffbearer]

I’m trying to push my Snow Leopard or Lion image that works on previous hardware on to a new 15 inch, non-retina Macbook Pro and neither is working.

I suspect that it’s because of some new hardware that isn’t in my base install / combo updates. The question is, How do I get the appropriate installer / updates to get this to work. In the past IE when the thunderbolt macs came out I used the Gray Recovery disk to do a thunderbolt only Snow Leopard image until apple released a combo update that worked with the new hardware. But I’m not sure how to do similar with Lion.

Also, Do you think future updates will allow Snow Leopard to work on the June 2012 Macs. Or should I expect that I can not run Snow Leopard on June 2012 macs and beyond?

[bw38]

I THINK this is what you’re looking for. Hope it helps anyways. This was an older article on the AFP548 website.

Downloading Hardware Specific Lion Installers

By Josh Wisenbaker

August 11, 2011 6:20 pm

With the change to the Mac App Store for delivery of OS X, Apple has stopped putting install media in the box with your shiny new Mac. If you want to re-install the OS then you use the Recovery HD and it installs right from the Mac App Store.

This presents a challenge for people with managed system deployments as you never have an installer disk for new hardware that comes out after whatever is on the Mac App Store for download until the next release. There is away around this though to get a nice fresh copy of the installer for whatever new hardware you have.

Read on for more.The Mac App Store is Smart

The Mac App Store is smart enough to know what kind of hardware is requesting an re-install of Lion. By looking at the type of Mac and serial number it will then push down the InstallESD.dmg for that hardware directly to your computer.

Then the Mac restarts from the image it downloaded and re-installs OS X.

This is great for your mom to re-install Lion with, but it also deletes the image after it’s done installing. What you need to do is grab that InstallerESD.dmg before it has a chance to do away with it.

Mac Sysadmins are Smarter

It’s very easy to use the Mac App Store’s smarts to our own advantage and gain access to a copy of that hardware specific OS build. Here’s what to do:

Boot the hardware you need an image for from the Recovery HD by holding Command-r at power on time.
Plug in a JHFS+ formatted external disk.
Select the Re-install OS X Lion option and target the external disk.
Once the Installer finishes downloading, simply shutdown and unplug the disk.

Now when you mount that external disk you will find a directory named Mac OS X Install Data on the root. Inside of this folder is the elusive, hardware-specific, InstallerESD.dmg image that you can feed to SIU or any other imaging tool of choice. Having this installer will now allow you to build out re-deployment images for all of your hardware until rollup installers are available.

Also, do not expect Snow Leopard to work on newer Macs. That’s just not how Apple goes about supporting older OSes. Usually they stop supporting older OSes on newer hardware and focus on making sure the current latest OS will support the newest hardware.

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