Bootable recovery partition?

Hello

I am a bit stuck for ideas and looking for some help. I am trying to create a bootable recovery partition to allow the systematic restoration of a mac. I work for a av hire company any we hire out macs for theatre shows e.t.c and they often come back to us bearing no resemblance to the machine sent out so we have to spend time going through and re-setting settings, uninstalling/re-installing programs and removing data.

What i would like to do is create a backup using netrestore. Then create a small (50GB) partition to store it on. Then to be able to boot off that partition and restore the main os back to it's former glory.

However i am at a loss as to how to do this. I have re-formated using diskutility resize, and i have created the restore image but i cannot find a satisfactary way to creat a small boot partition, i thought about copying the files off the mac os install dvd, minus xcode e.t.c but that doesn't seem to be bootable.

So any ideas anyone??

Cheers

Gareth

You can have the image on another Mac or hard drive if you wish and hold down T when booting to choose Target disk mode. Also, you can add a partition to EFI:

http://refit.sourceforge.net/

cheers karuzdo,

Ideally it would be great to have the image on the same computer as the install so we can do a restore onsite if needed.

Refit looks very interesting, but i think i have a solutuion.

I have partitones the drive leaving a 50GB backup partitions, then using SetFile i have hidden it from finder making it pretty much invisible to the end user. Then i have installed a basic version of OSX on the backup drive along with NetRestore, and on this install i have hidden all toolbars e.t.c and placed the image folder, NetRestore and a PDF with instructions on the desktop.

I think that will work, it's juts a pain having to install a whole os to do this,it would be great if there was something like the PE on windows to facilitate this.

Cheers

Gareth