Imaging a mac that has bootcamp partition?

[reggiep]

I am not sure what my options are here so I am relying on the Mac gurus for help.

We have 30 macs which we image using our mac server and all works fine BUT now we are going to bootcamp them so the non mac users can use the macs too.

 

I have two questions on this.

 

Most importantly how can we image the macs with a bootcamp partition?

 

Secondly is there a way for the user to choose whether to use mac or windows, maybe something on boot BUT also something like a shortcut that runs a selector to choose to reboot in to the other O/S?

 

Thanks

[nicklec]

There is a few boot menus, on our few bootcamp machines we use 'refit' (defaulting to Windows after 10 secs).

 

I've not actually done it with deploy studio but with netrestore we just had an image of the windows partition and an image of the OSX partition (partitioning needed to be done manually) I believe deploy studio can automate this.

Edited February 22, 2010 by nicklec

[jlucas]

I've just had to do this over the half term.

 

I used DeployStudio to make and deploy my images: DeployStudio

 

Fairly straight forward:

Install on the server

Make a share point to hold your images

Make an image to Netboot to

Build your image machine including Boot Camp partition

Netboot it and image the mac then the windows side.

Netboot all your other machines and image with Mac patition

Use Boot Camp to make Windows partition

Netboot and image Windows partition.

 

Its a lot of steps but it beats walking between each machine with a firewire cable and carbon copying them and can be done using ARD for most of it. Once you have the image store and server set up it should work for all macs (until they bring out a new chip or something).

 

This site has some good guides: DeployStudio Wiki

 

As far as a boot menu goes rEFit was something I was going to implement but ran out of time, for now the kids can just reboot and hold Alt to get into Windows.

 

Hope that helps.

[Robbocop]

Deploy Studio is widely used, and our guys seem to really like it.

[reggiep]

 

Hope that helps.

 

It helps but still confused! Does this mean that once finished we could have one image with both windows and mac on it or does it mean we image with mac os and then boot into other partition and then image that partition?

 

Thanks

[jamesmay]

The apple recommended app for os chooser is Bootpicker

 

Apple - Education - IT Professionals - BootPicker

[jlucas]

It helps but still confused! Does this mean that once finished we could have one image with both windows and mac on it or does it mean we image with mac os and then boot into other partition and then image that partition?

 

Thanks

 

Unfortunately you have to make 2 images, one for mac and one for windows.

Image the Mac partition and boot into Mac and use to boot camp tool to make the Windows partition.

You'll then have an NTFS partition that you can image with you Windows image.

I'm yet to have found a reliable way of making a single image with both images one it. If anyone else know how this can be achieved I'd love to hear. Save me no end of time!

 

 

James

[Robbocop]

Might need to get one of our install guys to give you the detail, but I think that with Deploystudio yes you have to create 2 images, but there are workflow options you can set up in there so that Deploystudio will automate the deployment of both partitions for you. I don't know what happens re sysprep and so on, but I know it's pretty straightforward to use. Sorry this is very vague, but there's plenty of detail on line which you might want to take a look at, and a healthy forum too Home

[reggiep]

Just as a follow up, I found that winclone was a great tool to use to clone the windows partition side. Takes about 10 minutes to image a 10 Gig partition from a network share. Works for me!

[chinesewhispers]

I haven't really had the chance to use deploy studio yet, it does seem a little daunting for some reason.

 

Anyway, what I'm doing at the moment, once we have the Mac image deployed is to use ARD (Apple Remote Desktop).

 

You can create the BootCamp partition with a single Unix command (takes a little working out to get the number of bytes correct!), send the Winclone image to a bank of Macs using the copy command, extract the Winclone image to the BC partition using another Unix command, install BootPicker using the installer in seconds, configure BootPicker with a few lines of Unix code.

 

All the above only takes one visit (to actually put the Mac in place), we then revisit to add the Windows to the domain, but I know that can be automated, just not got round to it yet.

[reggiep]

You can create the BootCamp partition with a single Unix command (takes a little working out to get the number of bytes correct!), send the Winclone image to a bank of Macs using the copy command, extract the Winclone image to the BC partition using another Unix command, install BootPicker using the installer in seconds, configure BootPicker with a few lines of Unix code.

 

.

 

Can you share the unix commands with ther less capable of us please?

[chinesewhispers]

Of course, but I don't see myself as any more capable.

 

From the Winclone help files (http://www.twocanoes.com/winclone/WinCloneARDDeployment.pdf)

 

diskutil resizeVolume / MS-DOS WINDOWS

 

You'll need to do some math and conversion for your own partition sizes, and trial and error.

 

To extract the image run

 

exec /Users/Shared/WindowsXP.winclone/winclone.perl -self-extract

 

But note the path depends where you copy the image to on the mac.

[chinesewhispers]

And to config bootpicker after install:

 

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/bootpicker windowsPartition "/dev/disk0s3"

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/bootpicker userChoosesBootOS -bool TRUE

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/bootpicker title "Welcome to a School Mac"

 

Again these commands are all in the documentation of the bootpicker preference pane when installed.

 

Line 1 says which the bootcamp partition is, line 2 says the user can choose, line three is just gloss as the title for the choice screen.

 

Get a Mac set aside to play with, there are lots more options!

[mbrunt]

WinClone is the correct way forward :-)