Utilities - OS X - Triage Drive

# Purpose

The purpose of this document is to explain my OS Triage Drive setup.

I will explain that I keep two drives. The first drive has Snow Leopard 10.6.x installed. The second drive has the most recenty release of OSX (currently Mavericks 10.9). If I worked in a shop with PPCs, I'd keep a copy of Leopard 10.5.x around.

# Glossary

OSX Triage Drive: A drive with only a vanilla install of OSX plus various utilities to help troubleshoot Macs with issues.

# Pre-requisites

* Functioning Mac with 10.7+ installed
* Ethernet connection
* Without DHCP, you must have a valid IP, Gateway, DNS.

# Hardware

* One 32 GB USB Flash Drive with 2 partitions. You can get away with less than 16 GB, but there's no real need for a 3rd partition on a 32 GB drive. (I found that 10.7.x required at least 13 GB.)

# Instructions

## Setting Up The Vanilla Image

### 10.6.8

Using a 10.6.x DVD, launch the installer and install onto your designated partition. 

### 10.7+

Boot functioning Mac into Recovery Mode.

#### With DHCP

You may install without further ado.

#### Without DHCP

Launch Terminal.

    networksetup ­listallnetworkservices

Verify that Ethernet is how the port is named. Modify as needed.

    networksetup -setmanual Ethernet [ip] [subnet] [router]
    networksetup -setdnsservers Ethernet [DNS1] [DNS2] [DNS3]

Quit Terminal

Turn off Wi-Fi. 

Run the Installer as per normal.

For more information about networksetup, please see https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/10.7/man8/networksetup.8.html

## Utilities To Install

* Smart Utility: www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php
* Rember: http://www.kelleycomputing.net/Rember/
* memtest (from the package contents of Rember)

## Image Those Drives

Use another Mac to launch Disk Utility and make DMGs of those two triage drives. That way you can have them around in case of issues later.