Vaughan White
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Re:Mac / PC Cloning - 2008/07/18 19:06
The easiest way of doing this is to get educational copies of VMWare Fusion, rather than dual boot with bootcamp. You can get great educational pricing and the beauty of it is you can easily restore the XP virtual machine by just copying a known good version over any corrupt one (or even use snapshots).
Once you have it all set up just as you need it then create a disc image using Disk Utility in the Utilities folder. Select File - New - Disc Image from Folder... and select the whole hard disc from Devices. You will need a firewire hard disc or another of your 50 macs booted in Target Mode (hold the 'T' key down whilst booting until you see the firewire symbol of the screen).
Create the image on the firewire drive (it will have created a .dmg file) and once completed from the menu bar select Images - Scan Image for Restore...
This takes about the same amount of time as it took to create the dmg file but must be done or the restore won't work.
Once you have the scanned image file you can restore it to the other macs using network restore (boot from the network by holding the 'N' key down whilst starting the machine until you see a world icon on the screen. I won't go into how to do that here or this would go on for ever. Check out Bombich's excellent Netrestore on his site at
http://www.bombich.com/software/netrestore.html for full details - it has been updated for Leopard.
The other, longer, way is to again set up one of the macs exactly how you want it and then set it into firewire mode. Boot each of the other macs from the dvd (hold the 'C' key down whilst booting until you see the spinning disc), select your language etc and continue until you get a menu bar at the top of the screen. You can now access Disk Utility again. This time select the restore tab and simply drag your connected firewire drive on to the "source" field and your local disc into the "destination" field and tick the 'erase destination' box then hit restore and go and make a coffee, have a smoke, read the forums etc. until finished.
You now have 2 machines with suitable images on them so next time round you can do 2 machines at the same time. This scales up on each pass as the next time you will have 4 machines to image from.
Beware that the discs must be the same size for this second option. If the destination is bigger than the original then you won't be able to use the spare capacity and your macbooks will have smaller discs than the imacs so the whole process will have to be repeated from scratch. This doesn't matter using the Image and Netrestore as long as the size of the image is smaller than the smallest disc, you will get the whole disk size back after the process is finished.
Anyway, the first option is the way I used to do it at the college where I worked and we had 100+ macs there.
I now use another method but you would need a couple of days training on how to use it - Casper and Recon for Mac - allowing you to roll out apps etc pretty much what you use SMS for on the Windows side.
You could also use Carbon Copy Cloner but it is not as techie as the above.
Anyway, that it my solution and others may do it differently - take it as you will. Have fun,
Regards,
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