MacBook Air Netinstall

So the new MacBook Airs (Late 2010) are some great pieces of machinery, and have introduced a new way to install OS X. They come with a read-only USB Flash disk that emulates a optical disc, which contains the install disc as well as the iLife '11 install files.

While this is a really cool thing, it is not, in fact, a traditional Mac OS X Install DVD. Therefore, it cannot be used to create a NetInstall set (for installing via the NetBoot service). If you try, it just fails after a few seconds of trying.

So how does one go about creating a NetInstall for our beautiful new Airs? I'll get to that in a bit, but first, some background about these flash drives.

How it works: These drives use a little known OS X feature called ImageBoot. Basically, it's similar to NetBoot, but running from a local drive. It allows a Mac to boot from a disk image file, rather than having to restore that image to a DVD or external drive. In this case, it is used to keep the Install disc separate from the optional installs (iLife '11).

How to make the NetInstall Get the files you need: Now when you insert the disk, you'll notice that there are no files except for 'Install iLife' and 'Install Mac OS X'.

The files you need to get are hidden, so the best way to find them and copy them out is using terminal. You can see the files in terminal by using 'ls -a'There are a bunch of hidden files, but the only one we need is MacOSX.dmg. You can extract and make it visible using these two commands (this should be done on your NetBoot server, but can also be done on any computer with the 10.6 Server Admin Tools installed): cp /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install/MacOSX.dmg ~/Desktop/MacOSX.dmg chflags nohidden ~/Desktop/MacOSX.dmg

This will copy the file to your desktop and un-hide it for ease of use.

Make the NetInstall set: Now all you need to do is mount MacOSX.dmg, and you can use System Image Utility to create a NetBoot/NetRestore/NetInstall set.

That's it! Simple as that. Now you can NetBoot those new MacBook Airs using USB ethernet or WiFi (802.11n suggested)