If you can’t use UNETbootin because your system is out of date, instead of using UNETbootin—or similar packaged “Make a bootable USB” tools—you can create a bootable USB flash drive right from the command line in Terminal as explained here. I am reworking those instructions because there are a few unclear/out-of-date things that should be ironed out. And why not clear that up here?
First, download the appropriate Free BSD ISO from here. For this example I am downloading the FreeBSD-10.1-RC3-powerpc-memstick.img
version of the image (which is the version tailored for USB flash drives) and saving it to the ~/Desktop
.
First, let’s open up the Terminal and go to the desktop like this:
cd ~/Desktop
Now, with the USB flash drive plugged into the computer run this command to get the filesystem name of the USB device:
df -h
For this example, let’s assume the device is named disk1s1
. Now we’re going to unmount the USB flash drive from the command line like this:
sudo diskutil umount /dev/disk1s1
Okay, with disk1s1
unmounted, run the dd
command to copy the contents of FreeBSD-10.1-RC3-powerpc-memstick.img
to the USB flash drive on /dev/disk1s1
:
sudo dd if="FreeBSD-10.1-RC3-powerpc-memstick.img" of="/dev/disk1s1" bs="10240"
Now wait for it to finish copying. And when that is done, you will have a bootable USB flash drive with FreeBSD-10.1-RC3-powerpc-memstick.img
on it.
And with that said, I realized that your PowerBook does not formally allow USB booting. So that alone won’t work, but advice in this answer as well as on this page will help. And it boils down to following these two steps after creating the bootable USB flash drive:
- Boot in the PowerBook OpenFirmware (the bootstrap that loads before Mac OS X) by pressing the Apple+Alt+O+F keys at the same time right after you switch on the machine (before the chime sound).
- Once in OpenFirmware enter this command:
boot usb1/disk@1:,\\yaboot
. If that somehow doesn’t work, you might be designating the incorrectusb[x]/
path so try this one with0
forusb
:boot usb0/disk@1:,\\yaboot
. The machine should reboot and you should be now booting off of the USB.
And if none of that seems to work, the later page referenced above seems to be a more succinct answer starting from item 4 in the list of instructions. Reproducing them here for clarity, formatting and reference:
- Then you boot in the PowerBook OpenFirmware (the bootstrap that loads before Mac OS X) by pressing the Apple+Alt+O+F keys at the same time right after you switch on the machine (before the chime sound)
- Type
dev / ls
and try to find something like/disk@1
next to an entry named USB (in my caseusb@1b,1
) - Type
DEVALIAS
in the command prompt and locate the short name of the USB entry you just found usingdev / ls
(in my caseusb0
) - Make sure your USB key holds a file called
BootX
with thetbxi
attribute by listing the directory. In the following command,disk@1
should be replaced by what you found in Step 5, also every character is important (this includes colon, forward slash, etc.). Type:dir shortname_found_in_step_6/disk@1:partition_number_found_in_step_3,\System\Library\CoreServices
(in my casedir usb0/disk@1:3,\System\Library\CoreServices
) - If
BootX
is found with an attribute calledtbxi
then you’re all set and you can instruct OpenFirmware to boot from the USB drive:boot usb0/disk@1:3,\System\Library\CoreServices\BootX
- Hit enter and you should be booting from the USB drive. You can then install the operating system as you would with a DVD.