Best Way to Image and Deploy Dual-Boot Macintosh? 124
macpulse asks: "What is the best way to image and deploy dual-boot Intel Macintosh desktops in an Educational environment? Our organization is getting ready to purchase dozens of new Intel Macs for each campus and we're not sure how to proceed. With Windows XP and Dell, we've simply used Symantec's Enterprise Ghost to deploy our images. Playing with the test Intel Macs we have, we are unable to get Ghost to work with the Mac. I've also played with Bombich's NetRestore product (which is FOSS!) but without much success. I'm curious how my fellow readers have resolved this issue. Thanks!"
What are you having trouble with? (Score:5, Informative)
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Or does each partition have to be set up and then the image copied across?
Re:What are you having trouble with? (Score:4, Informative)
You might have problems if the hard disks aren't the same size. If the destination hard disk is bigger than the source, you get some unpartitioned space at the end. Don't try it if the destination hard disk is smaller than the source.
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Post installation scripts are pretty easy for your FOSS stuff (we do FAI + svn co + make -C conf install), not so easy on XP. I don't have a clue about OS X, my Mac days were pre version 8.
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I have tried using the free version of bpbatch in the past but I have never got it to work correctly.
(it seems it loads itself somewhere in memory that later gets overwritten under certain circumstances. I tried to customize some of the examples provided to fdisk the HD and then copy something over from the network, but it always crashes with junk on the screen)
Maybe there are other free PXE "Pre-OS"es?
For now we use a
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Well, you can use PXELinux (part of the whole SysLinux [zytor.com] thing) to boot a kernel with a RAM disk (initrd), and run whatever you want from there. You will need a basic live distribution to go in the RAM disk, which contains init, libc.so, sh and whatever other bits you need. You can keep the size down by using busybox [busybox.net]. Creating a working initrd can be a little hairy, as your compile-time paths are normally different than the runtime ones, which can break some prog
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BPbatch exactly fits the bill, but unfortunately I cannot get it to work.
Using Linux for this seems overly complicated, but it could be practical when at least a readily usable configuration would exist. I know about busybox and assembling small Linux systems, but for this purpose (merely getting new machines installed) it
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What I like is to power-on the machine, press F12 for network boot, and then press some key to tell WHAT to boot.
When I boot one image, e.g. PXElinux or the 3com Pre-OS, it is not possible to switch to another one (e.g. via a menu) later.
The menu would have to be presented by the BIOS. Well, I will to further research, maybe this really can be done within PXE, or a first-stage loader
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NetBoot Darwin, dd image, mount partition, tweak configuration, unmount, and reboot.
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If I had to guess I'd say he's using the Ghost feature that lets you write a unique UUID to each NTFS image, and it doesn't understand EFI partition tables. In block mode it would work fine, but Windows has an onerous registration regime so you can't just do block mode.
I would go with NetRestore (Score:1)
We started out by netbooting to image half the drive with a custom OS X install and then used the OS X install to image the other half of the drive with a custom Windows install. We decided to have two images to make maintenance simpler as if we end up having problems with eit
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Also, this doesn't resolve the DUAL BOOT issue we're running into with Bootcamp.
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DD (Score:5, Informative)
When we get a new PC, we remove the drive and drop it into an external USB/IDE/SATA enclosure and connect ti to the Debian box. We DD the image onto the drive. It usually takes less than an hour per drive.
We can also image a drive across the LAN, but it's slower and we have to be present at the user's computer to boot off a KNOPPIX disc.
We have played with the idea of creating a DVD that has a cut-down debian distro and the image file. Then we can just drop in the restore disc and reboot. Come back an hour later and we're done.
You could also drop the image on the portable drive and use a boot CD to image PCs without opening them.
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Host the image on a USB drive
(A) make the drive itself a bootable install for machines that support USB boot
(B) keep a Linux/BSD live CD on hand for those that don't support USB booting
and then there is no need open up machines and you only need to deal with the USB enclosure once.
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An hour to image a machine?
The problem with DD is it has to write all the empty bits of the disk, too. A good imaging solution knows the filesystem and only writes the files. Since most desktops may have 5-6 gig of software on them by default, you don't want to be wasting time writing 80 or 100 gig of zeros.
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Or you can pipe dd through a compressor on the write; it will still read the zeroes, but it won't be writing them.
If you don't specify of=filename to dd, it will write output to stdout.
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DD has its place, but imaging a whole desktop is not it. There are massively better free tools for that.
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For others reading this, here is a link to the PartImg Is Not Ghost tool: http://ping.windowsdream.com/ [windowsdream.com]
Partitions (Score:2)
three words (Score:4, Informative)
By the way you can use Apple restore program ASR to create a disk that will automatically wipe and restore the machine its booted on.
PS unless you have something that would require dual booting (ie 3D PC apps) it would be much easier and more secure to use a virtual machine to run windows. (parallels or VMware Fusion).
PPS if your installing numbers of Macs in an educational setting you really have to look at Apple Remote Desktop its a one stop shop for all your Mac administration needs.
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Apple System Restore, Mac OS X Server, and NetBoot (Score:4, Informative)
I have not done this, but I assume you'd be able to set up a system exactly as you want it to be set up - with both Mac OS X and Windows partitions - and create an ASR image from that, which you can then restore and use at will.
Don't Partition (Score:5, Informative)
I also must disagree with one of the other responders who recommended Target disk mode. While this is good for a few computers (and is a great tool for making your source .dmg you'll deploy using the above tools), it does not work well for reimaging hundreds of Macs that are widely distributed across a campus. It requires that each technician be equipped with a firewire drive, which tend to grow legs. Also, more and more security-conscious companies (and colleges) are locking down computers so that neither USB nor Firewire drives can be used and/or forbidding the use of such devices. And then you'll have the problem of keeping each Firewire drive up to date with exactly the same image instead of just updating a single, master .dmg on the server as you can when using NetRestore.
True, it can be tricky to get NetBoot to work across subnets, but we got around that by putting multiple NICs in our NetBoot XServe, one for each subnet. (Yes, we tried Bombich's boot-across-subnets solution but could not get it to work, probably because of how our routers are configured.)
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Seconded. The only reasons to use Bootcamp are:
(1) cost [Parallels is very inexpensive, but not free]
(2) if you have high performance graphics requirements like games
(3) if you have multi core requirements.
If single core, non-accellerated performance will do, Parallels is a much better choice. Aside from being able to concurrently run OSX, XP and linux, the ability to work with the XP and linux OS images is superb; they're just files in the OSX filesystem. They're sandboxed, you can even isolate XP
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(2) if you have high performance graphics requirements like games
(3) if you have multi core requirements.
Just some notes:
(1) One of the catalogs offers Parallels for $7 with purchase of a Mac - BootCamp I heard will cost $30 when it's out of beta.
(2) VMWare Fusion solves (soon) this for some Direct-X apps
(3) VMWare Fusion solves this
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If you want a native Windows experience, you go with Bootcamp.
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From experience: DON'T (Score:4, Insightful)
Figure out what OS each machine needs to run, and install that one only. Another poster suggested Parallels, which is a great way to handle things if you only occasionally need a non-OS X OS.
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I could go on all day!
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Parallels has the same problem. (Score:2)
If you want to use Parallels as a sandbox, make sure you have "Enable sharing for drag-and-drop" disabled.
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Will Parallels work for multi-user systems? (Score:2)
Also for the people suggesting ASR for a dual-boot cloning solution - will that work with non-HFS partitions?
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Will the Parallels VM have it's own IP?
If so, no problems. The OS in the VM will be seen as a unique machine by the server.
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Works fine... your parallels VM looks like a completely seperate machine to the AD server. everything pretty much works as you'd expect. even WSUS updates work fine
Clonezilla (Score:1)
It has a program called Clonezilla [sf.net] that serves the images by multicast or unicast. I use that at work for installing the machines with multi-boot (WindowsXP+Ubuntu) and it works just fine and prety fast too
The only thing that you have to try is if it work with mac, but i think it will because of the way that the program does the image of the disc.
Don't (Score:2)
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I was under the impression that all Boot Camp did was allow you to resize an existing HFS partition, insert some EFI extensions so that XP/Vista can load and allow you to select an OS on startup, and burn a drivers CD for you.
A recent build of Boot Camp includes a host of updated drivers, which appear to fix most of the problems I've heard described about.
What "large known bugs" are you referring to?
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>Basically, from the sound of it, you don't know what you are doing, which for a large scale deployment in a production area, can only end in disaster.
LOL!
Let me clarify that I can image a lab full of Macs with ONLY Mac OS X installed just fine, no problems.
-AND-
I can image a lab full, or an entire campus, of Dell PCs with XP just fine as well - in fact, it's even easier.
What we're running into a problem with is imaging DUAL-BOOT machines with Bootcamp. Apparently there are some round about way
Don't be quick to comment unless you've used macs (Score:3, Informative)
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+1,000,000 - THANK YOU! This complexity you speak of is exactly what encouraged me to Ask Slashdot.
Is there not a bit for byte clone tool for Mac OS X that works with the Intel Mac GUID partition map?
It would be nice if there was a tool as easy and elegant as Ghost or TrueImage for the Mac that worked regardless of how it was partitioned.
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Why dual anything? (Score:1)
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There are registry flags for Windows to override the default behaviour and use UTC for the on-board clock.
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How about an Xserve? (Score:2)
It has built-in facilities for booting and imaging systems over a network, in addition to facilities for distributing updates. The documentation doesn't look like it supports Windows partitions, but you could (at least in theory -- check with Apple
I haven't personally done this,
CCCloner & Winclone (Score:4, Informative)
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I'll be giving this a try, thanks jeffasselin!
I use dd + a live cd (Score:3, Informative)
if you have a usb drive mounted to
[replace ad0 with hda if using Linux, or the appropriate device if neither]
create image
netcat
image storage: netcat -l -p PORT_NUMBER_HERE | split -b 1073741024 - img_name-
image source: dd if=/dev/ad0 | bzip2 -z -9 | netcat STORAGE_MACHINE_IP PORT_NUMBER_HERE
local USB HD
dd if=/dev/ad0 | bzip2 -z -9 | split -b 1073741024 -
Restoration involves:
netcat
destination machine: netcat -l -p PORT_NUMBER_HERE | dd of=/dev/ad0
image storage: cat img_name-* | bunzip2 | netcat TARGET_IP PORTNUMBER
usb drive:
cat
Of course, this has the problem that it requires typing out a couple of commands and it does not autoconfigure your machines (so you have to go in and manually make any needed changes), but it's a fairly inexpensive process.
It's a UNIX system, you don't need a live CD (Score:2)
The way to do it if you are of any decent size (Score:2)
2: Prep both your final images (including radmind for the OSX one) for ASR multicast
3: Start both asr multicast jobs
Then on each computer, boot into the netboot image, reformat and then drop down the images with asr. If you're slick, this can all be scripted into launchd.
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The way to do it if you are of any decent size
You boys are getting pretty explicit nowadays!
Boot Camp needs frimware updatews to work and EFI (Score:2)
Also they use the GUID Partition Table (GPT) and EFI there is also an EFI boot partition that is needed.
Some times apple sends out systems with updated drivers / systems files that are newer then updates on apple update / apple website.
Here's my dual-boot recipe (Score:2, Informative)
Requirements:
Mac OS X Install DVD, or a bootable FireWire/USB drive
BartPE CD with Ghost
Windows XP SP2 CD
Intel Mac (with all firmware updates applied)
Once you've created your master Mac/PC images (using Ghost on the PC and Disk Utility/Apple Software Restore on the Mac), here's how they're deployed.
1. Either boot from Mac OS X Install DVD or a FireWire/USB HD. Launch Disk Utility, restore HD with your Mac image.
2. Boot off your Ma
I've done this myself (Score:2)
Mac OS and Windows XP (Score:2, Informative)
To start, you want to create a GUID Partition Table on your external drive. This will allow the drive to boot from an intel mac. The older "Apple Partition Map" will not boot from an Intel, so this is the foundation step.
Once you've got that ready, you will want to use Carbon Copy Cloner [bombich.com] from Bombich to make your image(s) onto your external drive.
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So after you take the image, you then pass the external HD around to the other 24 Macs (25 in a lab in our case) and boot each one and push the image back to them?
Is there a way to do it with less manual labor, and without Mac OS X Server?
Since Netboot has difficulty working accross vlan segments, is there a way to make Mac OS X client work as a Netboot server? Say, have our instructor station in the room be the Netboot server?
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What are you using to deploy the image? The same external boot drive? So after you take the image, you then pass the external HD around to the other 24 Macs (25 in a lab in our case) and boot each one and push the image back to them?
I use more then one external hard drive in this case. We actually created an image of a stripped down osx install (800megs, anything further and I would have been getting ridiculus) for easy external HD prep. Just duplicate the image to however many external discs you feel you need, then go image crazy.
I would also reccomend that you multiply the bottles of Rum in this instance, as it does tend to run out halfway through...
As for the rest, I feign ignorance. (Read: I don't have the foggiest clue)
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Why is
NetRestote & Parallels (Score:1)
Some suggestions (Score:2, Informative)
From one of my collegues at work in charge of his own dept at our university.
"Yes.
The key is that bootcamp doesn't make the partition "active".
So we have a CD that boots into DOS to run fdisk to activate the partition.
Then it's golden."
Another issue
" I was having problems getting my Ghosted XP load onto my new mini (I could Ghost to the bootcamp-created partition, I could use my 'fd
NetRestore FTW! (Score:3, Interesting)
We netboot to restore the OSX image, then simply roll the XP image as a post action. You can then reimage independently using netrestore. (We actually still use ghost for deploying some software, and the rest of our images - NetRestore is faster and easier!)
Our only initial problem was getting the NTFS partition there to roll to, as ntfs-utils (NetRestore uses these to work with the NTFS filesystem) was having none of creating it itself!
In theory you could automate the process entirely if you bypass bootcamp.
Our mac image takes roughly 6 minutes to deploy, in groups of 5-6 over a gig link, and weighs in at about 5 gig, excluding the xp image.
Keep it simple! (Score:1)
I recommend that you stick with ghost - it is the most simple & reliable dual-boot deployment solution we have found. Once you have it set up - which doesn't take long, it is very easy to create & deploy images. This is great if you have new staff, or need someone else to deploy the lab for you.
To run ghost, you can build a Bart PE CD - make sure you include ghost 8.2 files (especially if you are ghosting across subnets) & include the network drivers for your mac hardware. I have not tested th
imaging (Score:2)
Tip to get you started (Score:2)
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061 025130528687 [macosxhints.com]
I can say that this worked for cloning a huge number (ok, more like 3) of MacBook Pros at work for dual booting. (Copying PAGEFILE.SYS is not necessary, as it will be created on Windows Boot.)
Add some shell scripts, ssh
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http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_B
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I'm looking at one because I want a small laptop that runs Linux. There are no other laptops from Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway etc that have all the requirements for the same price.
I've priced things from Dell. I actuall
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Sadly, the wireless on Intel Macs is an Atheros chipset, and support for this particular chipset by the Atheros driver for Linux is still experimental, so you'll probably get stuck with fucking ndiswrapper...
I've yet to install Linux on my MacBook (but thinking about it) so I can't confirm, but apart from wireless I've heard that everything else is pretty dandy.
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Anyway, I did find one there that was kind within the price range. The only problem is that it came with Vista Business with no option to change or upgrade that.
If I got this, I would want to dual boot between Windows and Linux, but not the Business edition.
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I've *heard* that you can do an in-place upgrade to Ultimate. Of course they'll charge ya a few bucks.
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Just seems kinda stupid that you get no choice. They must have crates of these things already made.
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XPS is nice enough, my wife has the M1710.
The SZ series, which I personally have and love, is a bit more expensive, but clocks in at 4.1lb, $1951 gets you your CPU, 2GB 533mhz RAM, 160gig, ABG wireless, DVD-DL RW. For $99 more you can get it with integrated WWAN (ie EvDO from C
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What is up with the graphics, I've never heard of a Hybrid system. Will this sort of thing work with Linux?
Graphics
Hybrid Graphic System - NVIDIA® GeForce(TM) Go 7400 and Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Video RAM: Video RAM: 335MB Total Available Graphics Memory , NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 7400 notebook graphics processing unit (GPU) and 224MB Total Available Graphics Memory , Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950
BTW, I had to use IE to even
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There are valid reasons to use just about every OS out there, including Windows. Get over yourself.
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With a busted flush? Really? If you capitalise...
Ha! What a joke! You don't even know what game you're playing!
I was referring to how when I asked for more technical details, you responded by again attacking my English. You bluffed. You're nothing but a pedantic college student who just happens to know enough about the Unix philosophy to talk a good talk, but when it comes down to it you have absolutely nothing to deliver. So instead you choose a subject you're less familiar with (English) and try to force it to comply with Unix file naming conventions.