Running 19 days
without a restart.

Changing the Desktop Pattern on a Minimum System Disk.

This question has been asked so many times over the past several years, it's about time I wrote it up as a tutorial. Often, a corporation or school will create their own custom Rescue/Repair CD. It will contain a copy of the universal System Folder from a MacOS CD, maybe a repair utility, and sometimes a folder of default preferences; for example, browser bookmarks, help files, or company rolodex.

The System folder from a MacOS CD displays the familiar CD desktop pattern. Many creators of these CD"s would rather have their company logo or school emblem displayed instead. This simple edit will show you how.

First, you need to get your company of school logo to the appropriate size and format. The shareware GraphicConverter is perfect for this because it can save your image directly to a ppat resource.

Prepare your image by resizing it to fit in a 128x128 square. While saving it to disk, from the popup menu select ppat resource.

Unfortunately, you cannot set the resource number ID, so after you have completed your image, open the ppat in ResEdit.

As shown in the image above, find the ppat resources and open them with a double-click. From ResEdit's Resource menu, select "Get Info" and change the ID number from 128 to 16. Close the Get Info window and copy the new ID 16 to the clipboard.

Next, make a copy of the MacOS CD System folder to your hard disk.

Open the System suitcase in ResEdit and find the ppat resources.

Open them with a double-click.

The CD desktop pattern is stored is stored in ID 16, so paste in your new one from the clipboard. When the dialog box appears, select YES to replace resources with the same ID.

Save you work and quit ResEdit. Your modified System suitcase now contains the new desktop pattern and is ready to be burned to your Rescue/Repair CD.