So I have carefully read Josh's answers on question 35108, Upgrade to Snow Leopard Without a CD Drive
But when I am in Disk Utility, it says "This disk contains the startup volume and can't be partitioned".
Does this mean I am doomed to Mac OS X 10.4 if I can't upgrade with a cd drive, usb drive, or external drive? This is super frustrating =(
You don't need a hard drive, or optical drive installed on the system... You can use any Macintosh to create a disk image, and restore it to a thumb drive... You'll need at least a 6 Gb thumb drive though.
You don't need to restore it to your 2nd partition... Unless you really have to.
Either way the process would be the same, create a disk image of the DVD, then use Disk Utility to restore the disk image to the drive you want to use as the installer...
I installed it using an external HDD, because my Superdrive was malfunctioning at the time. However, you'll still need access to a disc drive so that you can rip the original Snow Leopard disc.
Rip the original disc to a disk image, and then partition your external drive. Open Disk Utility and restore one of the partitions using your disk image of Snow Leopard. Boom. Bootable partition.
I upvoted a few answers since the are indeed valid ways to upgrade a mac without an optical drive. However, I'm afraid the answer to your questions is "no you cannot upgrade your mac without some sort of external media".
I'm not trying to be rude, simply stating the answer that no one feels comfortable saying. Every situation has it's limitations. Furthermore, without a backup drive, I wouldn't recommend a reinstall since that's a risky endeavour.
Best of luck with finding a secondary media source.
Live Partitioning (the feature that Josh suggested using) was only introduced within Disk Utility in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.x). Since you're using Tiger (10.4.x) your version of Disk Utility doesn't allow you to do this.
However you can still do it from the command line (10.4.6 or newer) or by using Boot Camp (if you still have it installed even though it's not supported).
Command Line Live Partitioning in Tiger:
# Determine the disk ID of your startup volume:
diskutil list
The output should look similar to:
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Myriad 999.9 GB disk0s2
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *300.1 GB disk1
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS Garamond 299.7 GB disk1s2
In this case the disk we care about is disk0s2 (my startup volume is called Myriad, my Time Machine backup, Garamond) and that you'll notice disk0s0 say GUID_partition_scheme. If it does not, live resizing will not work.
You can then create a new 8GB partion by running the command:
#sudo diskutil resizeVolume DISK_ID FORMAT NAME SIZE
sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 JHFS+ SnowyDVD 8G
It's important you have enough free space. It may ask you to restart the computer but you can then continue to follow the instructions to restore the .dmg onto the newly created partition.
To reclaim the space, after the installation you need to use gpt to remove the partition:
#Find the partition (gpt show DISK_ID)
sudo gpt show disk0
Determine which partition number the Snow Leopard DVD image was restored on: the first GPT part is the EFI partition, the second should be your startup drive and 3 should be your Snow Leopard DVD partition. You should be able to tell from the size.
You can remove the partition by running:
sudo gpt remove -i NUMBER disk0
You can then resize your partition back to it's full size:
sudo diskutil resizveVolume disk0s2 SIZE
You can double check your max size by running:
sudo diskutil resziveVolume disk0s2 limits
That said, I'm not sure how making a partition is going to help you if you haven't already imaged your Snow Leopard DVD since you don't have a DVD drive.
