“I remember something very special about my old System 6 machine. That is, the System file was about 400-600 KB and you could put just about any program on a floppy with it, bless it right, and then you had a rescue disk. Things are exponentially more complex for the modern Mac, however. Install disks wind up blowing 400-600 megabytes on the installer and OS alone. It won’t fit on a floppy, and unless you trick it right, it won’t fit on a CD, either,” CODEPOET writes for Mac Geekery.

There’s a solution, though, and it’s kind of funny how it works. You see, Apple provided a tool for something rather different that also works great for this. In my previous article on NetBoot I showed you how to make an installer image that installed a custom package and noted that it was burnable as well. Well, curious thing about it, it does exactly what we need:
• It uses your current OS to build the OS for the image
• It creates an OS that comes in around 500 MB
• It starts one program, which lists others to use

“Sounds perfect, really. So what we need to do is make this work for us. That part is astonishingly easy,” CODEPOET writes.

Easy instructions are in the full article here.

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