New to Mac - How to image

[MediaInfo]

Hi All,

I have been assiged a Mac project to do the following:

Find out which software are available in the market to create Mac images so that we can install images from external drive i.e Firewire drive as at the moment we have been using the CDs which came with the Mac.

Deploy Software through server as at the moment we just go around with CDs to all the macs and install it manually on each Mac. What i would like to do is select the machine which needs a software and get it installed remotely using the remote software.

We have about 40 Macs altogether.

I would appriciate your help.

Many Thanks in advance.

 

[DDFHB]

I use Apple Remote Desktop 3.1 for this kind of thing, multiple installs and updates.

 

[MediaInfo]

Thanks DDFHB,

Can i create images using the Remote desktop?

 

[ObviousTroll]

MediaInfo,

It's been a while since I used Remote Desktop, but I don't remember it supporting images.

What we used is a free software package called "Carbon Copy Cloner" to duplicate removable drives on XServes.

The procedure I would suggest would be:

1. Get a large external harddrive, divide it into two partitions. Make one the "Installer" and the other the "Image".

2. Install OS X and Carbon Copy Cloner on the external drive.

3. Configure a Mac exactly the way you want. Plug in the external drive and reboot. Boot from the external drive. (This involves holding down a key at boot time). Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the internal hard drive to the Image partition.

At this point, you can go to each machine, plug in the external drive, boot off it, then use CCC to copy the Image partition to the internal hard drive.

 

[ObviousTroll]

Update - just a reminder, you have to use a Firewire drive, not USB.

 

[jmgalvin]

A disc image can easily be created in Disk Utility, located in the Applications/utility folder on all macs. You can read up on this by launching disk utility and thne going to Help.

Generally, you set up a machine as you want it and them make a restore disk image.

An administrator can push that over a mac network but that requires a certain amount of knowledge. However, if you enable FTP on the machines, the .dmg can easily be sent to the machines on the network, and then it's just a matter of a simple "restore" on each machine.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[MediaInfo]

Thank you guys for your reply.

I would like to deploy CS3 to 40 Macs within the site but i don't want to install the whole CS3 package...i only want to install selected applications. Can i do this using Apple Remote Desktop 3? If so, is it straight forward?