How to get experimental rw ZFS support AFTER upgrading to 10.5.1

The alternate title of this entry is "Force install of ZFS Beta Seed v1.1 on Leopard"

 

This is performed at your own risk. The steps described remove any logical restriction for installation of the package.

 

There is more than one way to implement this particular hack. This method uses the package installer (a cleaner more friendly hack than manually copying files). Other recommendations included installing 10.5 on a different partition and subsequently installing the patch and copying the package files.

A simple alternative left to the reader would be extract the files from the package Payload an manually copy the files into place (cat /tmp/ZFSseed1/ZFSBetaSeed1.pkg/Payload | pax -z -r -v).

 

On to the actual Implementation:

Download the dmg from developer.apple.com

 

Mount the DMG:

open ~/Desktop/Inbox/leopard_9a559_zfsbetaseed1_0613523123.dmg

Expand the package:

pkgutil --expand /Volumes/ZFS\ 1/ZFSBetaSeed1.pkg /tmp/ZFSseed1

Edit the Distribution file and comment out the line that actually checks the requirements (and "causes" the failure):

vi /tmp/ZFSseed1/Distribution
//

Flatten the edited expanded package directory back into package format:

pkgutil --flatten /tmp/ZFSseed1 /tmp/ZFSrw.pkg

Open the package installer:

open /tmp/ZFSrw.pkg

Install the package and reboot.

Again this is performed at your own risk. The steps described remove any logical restriction for installation of the package and may cause you system to explode or you cat to catch fire.


References:

ZFS Beta Seed v1.1 will not install on Leopard (10.5.1)

Edit: I guess I should mention that it does actually appear to work :) Next I'm going to try and switch access between Leopard and Solaris under Parallels

Edit1:  Changed comment marks from // to ; // works if you are commenting in the embedded script part not the XML part. Thanks to Colin Seymor for catching that.