Imaging using Disk utlity

on my mac mini i've successfully installed a dual boot between OSX and Windows. I installed the rEFIt bootloader as well and all is working fine.

My problem is that I need to do the same thing on about 100 other macs!!! and since each process is very long i decided to use the Disk Utility to make an image of the HD and then restore it on the new machines.

I noticed that i can't make an image of the whole HD and i need to make a seperate one for each parition (one ofr mac and one for windows)

but now i'm having trouble restoring it since i did some research nd found out there is a glitch in the Disk utlity that comes with the startup CD that won't let you drag a Destination to the box.

so i had to use the terminal and use ASR from command line but im still failing.

Any ideas on any easy way of doing this? i also have Norton ghost on hand in case if you think that might help.

thank you

grab a firewire cable and connect two macs together, boot the mac with the good partition off a linux CD, then boot your target mac into Target Disk mode, this is done by holding "T" on boot, it will then connect as a drive, and you can then use dd in linux to mirror the drives, the command is



assuming sda is your drive and sdb is the firewire drive (ie, other mac), which it probably is, i think you could also do this with norton ghost or maybe even the OS X install CD if you try hard enough, but once you get the process down you should be able to get everything done pretty fast, if you get a lot of firewire cables you could probably get all 100 imaged in 1 day

thank you so much. Just to clarify, as far as the linux CD goes, you mean just an Ubuntu or something Live CD that will load the Ubuntu OS from the CD? and then type that command from the shell?>

yea, a unbuntu live CD, boot it, and with a Mac pluged into it over firewire in target disk mode it should just image the drive, you also might want to verify the drives using `fdisk -l` and make sure it shows the right drives and the names are right (check the partition sizes), the if= if the source drive and the of= is the destination drive in the command i gave you

as a note though, this will do a byte for byte image, that means if your source drive is the size that all other drives will get formatted to, so if you are imaging from a 100GB drive you can image to a 120GB drive, but there will be 20GB free space, if you try it to an 80GB drive at least one partition will get corrupted

perfect. thank you very much. this shouldn't be a problem as all the MacMinis are the same and have the same HD space. I will give it a try tomorrow and keep you posted.

Cheers

do you know how long it would roughly take to do a 60GB HD?

i looked at FDISK -l and saw SDC1, SDC2, SDC3

so i did the command you mentioned above with if=/dev/sda and of=/dev/sdc and it's been running for the past 50 minutes without giving an error or writing anything!!!

any ideas?

i used the "bs=128MB" tag for DD and it seemed to have done it in roughly an hour! do you know how high I can push that number without screwing things up?

also another issue is regarding Windows Activation! i have a different OEM for each of the 100 computers but when i mirrored the first one, I don't know how to change the activation. Cause it's already active but has the same product key as the one being mirrored. any ideas how to change that?