09-18-2008, 09:51 AM

I have a classroom with 15 Imacs & 4 Powermacs G5 I need to to create to separate images & ghost the images with leopard to the respective macs. How do I do that? Thanks for the help!


speedy21d

09-18-2008, 08:45 PM

You have (at least) two options.

If you don't mind imaging one Mac at a time, you can install OS X on an external drive, boot from it, and use Disk Utility (Applications>Utilities) to create an image of the source drive of the "model" machine. Then connect the external drive to each machine in turn, boot from the external drive, and use Disk utility to "restore" the image to the target (internal) drive on the machine.

A more complex, but more efficient, method would be to set up a NetBoot server (on any machine running 10.5,) and use NetRestore to deploy the image across your network.

Admittedly, using NetBoot/NetRestore is a more complicated way to image the machines in your lab, but in the long run, it will make imaging them easier. (I use this method in a lab I manage.)

09-24-2008, 04:23 PM

How do I use Netboot & Net restore?

10-13-2008, 12:23 PM

Hope you all don't me me reviving this thread-

I work for a university and have recently moved up in the ranks and am now working as a tech- no prior experience so forgive me if I ask dumb questions. I'm the most experienced Mac user in the dept. so people are coming to me with their questions-

Recently a Macbook Pro was donated to us, and we have it available to use as our test subject for OS X related issues. We're an all Windows campus, but demand for Macs is growing, and certain faculty are beginning to purchase Macs anyways, and we would really love to have an image that we can drop to all of the Macs here so that we have a consistent environment to work on when issues arise. We use Norton Ghost to accomplish this normally, but it doesn't work for OS X just yet so we need an alternative.

One of the other techs tried CCC in the past, but it seemed to have corrupted some of the frameworks for Office 2008- Word absolutely will not run and we can't figure out why. Netboot and Netrestore sound like they may be viable options- but I'm not totally sure on the requirements.

Do Netboot and Netrestore work like a multicast done in Norton Ghost? Can I run them from any 10.5 Mac or do I need to have 10.5 server? Can i simply create my image using Apple's Disk Utility? When i want to drop the image onto another machine do Netboot/ Netrestore erase and format the target disk or will that need to be done manually?

Thanks so much for any answers that you can provide.