DasBoot is a free Macintosh utility that turns your iPod or USB flash drive into a bootable drive for your Mac. It also helps copy diagnostic and repair utilities onto the iPod or flash drive.

I checked it out… you need a bootable CDROM and an iPod or a flash drive. I believe that you can only create bootable flash drives on Intel Macintoshes, but you should be able to make bootable iPods on Intel or PPC machines.

Why do you want a bootable iPod or flash drive? Disk repair utilities generally can’t repair the volume you boot from, so if your Mac gets into trouble you’ll need to boot from a different disk than you normally do in order to try to fix it. Even if it’s not a disk problem, have a second device you can boot from is security against installing that piece of software that vomits all over your boot disk and leaves you to pick out the corn from the beans.

DasBoot is content to build a bootable disk based on a hard drive, as well; the problem is that it’s not very discriminating about what it copies (who can blame it? it’s hard to tell what’s needed and what’s not) so it’s likely to try to squeeze a significant chunk of the hard drive’s contents on the iPod or flash drive, and fail (or at least leave you with a lot less room for music). When you start with a bootable CD (like Disk Warrior), you know you’re just getting what you need.

You can download DasBoot from here. You don’t need to go through the checkout process; just scroll down the page a bit to the gigantic yellow “Download - Click Here” picture.

Once you have your bootable removable disk created, you can boot from it by restarting your Mac and holding down the OPTION key while it starts up. It should prompt you to choose which volume you want to boot from.

You can also easily make a bootable external hard drive just using your MacOS X install CD; you don’t need DasBoot for that. The nice thing for your iPod is that DasBoot helps MacOS X coexist with the iPod software.

And - DasBoot is free.

Via: DasBoot makes iPod into a bootable drive - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
[tags]macintosh, boot, cdrom, flash drive, usb flash, bootable, ipod[/tags]

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