NetRestore 3.4.5 and Windows Partitions.

[HodgeHi]

Hello,

I am still having huge amounts of difficulty doing what was once a simple-ish task. I managed to create my Tiger/XP Images in a couple of days and deployed them in 1 day.

Leopard is proving to be somewhat of a git to do. I am now onto NetRestore 3.4.5 and have now managed to create a Leopard Image 10.5.3. I have created the XP sp3 image as well. But now i can't restore.

I have tried to set up a dual-deployment where the OS X image is deployed and then so to is XP straight after. NetRestore has changed so you can now configure this in the GUI. I have as far as i am aware done this correctly.

The Machines boot from a NetInstall set and then the disk gets partitioned. It then proceeds to restore the Leopard Partition. This is all fine, but when it gets to the XP restore it then fails. At first i got a Failed to extract MBR error. I tried to do what the guy said in the link but i am not sure i fully understood what he meant. I created a applescript app and after NetRestore had partitioned the drive and started the OS X restore, i opened terminal and ran the app to copy the file into the Windows partition. This got passed that error, only to present me with another immediately after which was expected post action. It should be fine but i am unsure as to what post action it is reffering to.

Any Ideas or has anyone managed to do a leopard and XP restore using an earlier verison. If so what version did you use?

Thanks in advance for any help.

PS Sorry for the long post.

[Rozzer]

I am also having the same issue here

I would like to have a fix soon because i just put out 20 iMacs and expected to make a image and it to be quite easy!

Ross

[HodgeHi]

I have now managed to deploy an image for both OS X and XP. What is the issue you are experiencing? Is it the same as above or something else?

[Rozzer]

Ive had the same error you had above and another one but it fails at the end of the image. I am trying winclone at the moment.

How did you get around it?

Ross

[HodgeHi]

I used the simple script (created by the guy in the link) that would copy the file needed from the source image onto the target drive. This then allowed for the image to get the file needed from the target drive and then write the image to the target drive. It seems it only needs it to extract the MBR before it starts the re-imaging process.

What i did was put the script into the image in the utilities folder and then when the image automatically creates the partitions and starts the OS X image i open a terminal window and then run the script. When Net-Restore then gets to the Windows Deployment it finds the file and starts that image. It's not automated but i have found that i only had to do it the one time. The others have been fine.

Hope this helps. I have also added an additional note to the sticky on OS X deployment that mentions about partition sizes.

[Rozzer]

I have to say his script confused me. Can you paste the script you used and the steps you did.

Thanks,

Ross

[HodgeHi]

OK, the first thing you need to do is create the image for the OS X partition.

If you can try to create a smaller partition for XP than 50% using the boot camp utility. The reason for this is that i found that if you choose equal in Boot camp utility and then tell the Net-Restore the same (50%) in the dual-deployment configs, there is a discrepancy where the Net-Restore will fail as the XP image is too big to fit on the Partition. It seems that that the Boot camp util uses a larger size than the Net-Restore partitioning system which results in the partition being too small for XP.

I hope you get what i mean.

So when you have created the OS X image you need to create the net-install set.

When this is done you need to copy the image up onto the share where you will deploy the image from. Mine is called "Images"

Next copy the .nbi (Net-Install set) up ton the NetBoot share so you can boot from it on the clients.

Now you will need to copy the file attached int he zip called fixes into this share as well. Here is where we will run the script from.

We will now need to create an image of the XP partition.
Put it in the "Images" share as well.

I didn't think there would be any need to create a .nbi set for the XP as i want it to deploy with the OS X side.

We now need to configure the Net-Restore to make a dual deployment.

So go into the configurations and make one to deploy our Image from the server we just created.

Enter the name of the image.
Enter the location of the share, in our case afp://servername/Images
Enter the name and password to connect to the share

Create a preference for the XP image as well. We need to point the dual-deployment config to this preference.

When this is done we need to configure the preferences to create a dual-deployment of our OS X and XP image.

Choose our OS X preference we just created and click dual deployment. Slide the slider to 50% and then choose the XP Image preference we made.

Now we have our configuration made. We need to open our OS X Net-Install set and copy our XP_fix.app (do this only if your deployment share is also called "Images" if not edit the .scpt file to correspond to your server share) into the utilities folder in the Net-Install set.

We should now be ready to go.

Configure net boot to use the OS X Net-Install set as the default.
Start up a client while holding don the N key. This should boot into Net-Restore and start the partition going.
Once the OS X image starts to deploy open a terminal command from the menu system at the top (utilities i think its in or tools).

Run the script we made from the location.

/volumes/Net-Restore/utilities/XP_fix.app (i think thats the command. Damn me for not writing it down!!)

This should then copy the file onto the WINDOWS partition.
Close terminal and then when the XP image starts it should find the file and then continue with the restore.

IF you get another error about Expect post-actions it usually points to the fact that the partition is too small for the image size as mentioned earlier.

Hope this helps.