CCC + iMac's.

I work in a school district, and we have a few older iMacs sitting around that teachers want in their rooms to run basic programs. Here, when we do imaging, we have a cloning machine. We all know these bowling ball iMacs take about a year to get the hard drive out of, so I'm searching for an alternative.

I read about Carbon Copy Cloner a little bit and I set up the base model image on the first iMac. I was wondering something about CCC... First of all, is it possible to clone another iMac via firewire cable? I read bits and pieces about booting the subject computer into target mode and from the base computer, pushing the clone over. Is that possible?

Secondly, I tried to open CCC just to mess around with it. I downloaded CCC 3.1 on an XP machine, then on a jumpdrive threw it over to the iMac and installed it. When I open it, it closes almost immediately. Is it because it detects nothing else attached to it to push a clone to?

Thanks for your time.

The "bowling balls" are not iMacs. You're thinking of eMacs.

Carbon Copy Cloner is not a "sysprep" application as one would use to deploy the same installation image to many machines. It's strictly a backup device and a very good one. I use it in lieu of Time Machine. I guess it could be used to do a clone in Target Mode but that would be against Apple's licensing.

If you downloaded CCC in Windows it should have been in the form of a *.dmg file. Did you install CCC or just double click the file?

Regards.

We refer to them as bowling balls, due to their round shape. I'm familiar with eMacs as well. I always had a nack for thinking of star wars when I looked at those things, though. If you've ever seen the body of an eMac on somebody's head before, you'll know what I mean! ;P

I downloaded it in windows. Yes, it was a dmg file. When I installed it, I double clicked the file. It said about moving it to my applications folder, so I did. I tried numerous things.

It's strange. I'm a big linux guy, so I'm used to tar.gz and ./configure and all of that garbage. But my knowledge in mac isn't too in depth. Is there something I was supposed to follow through with but failed to?

Also - The reason I'm using CCC is due to the way these computers were set up. However, I may have been misunderstanding. Now that I think about it, it may be possible that the OS was already on the mac's that we have here, but they used CCC to copy over all of the settings, network configurations, and profiles. Hmmm... I was just assuming CCC was a full blown Mac version of Ghost.

Here is your problem if you are using either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. It is with the license codes for the thrid party software. You will need to re-install the license key for each system. If that is not an issue, then you should be okay, since you do have a valid license of the OS for each system you are working on.

With the above software you can create a bootable image on a firewire drive. Once done, you can booot from the firewire drive and reverse the process by coloneing the firewire dirve on to the system drive. If all of your system are of the same type, you should not have a problem.