Deploy Dual Boot Macs

[steventaylor]

Just thought I would let everyone know about Deploy Studio a cool free OS X product for deploying dual boot or even triple boot Intel based Macs.

 

Available from deploystudio.com

 

It lets you pick the partition sizes of your hard drive for each OS you want to install, it then partitions them for you and you select which image you wish to load onto each partition.

 

Not to fiddly to set up either, I boot the Mac I'm going to build from a USB stick (you can also netboot) to connect it to my OSX server and a nice little gui loads, other ways are to install the server part onto a firewire HDD if you don't have a OS X Server and boot the machine you are going to image from that.

 

There are some enhancements to the new version such as updating installed packages to deployed machines, which I've not had chance to play with yet.

[jubbi]

Hi,

One of my schools (primary), is going down the route of dual boot macs in their suite. Am I correct in thinking that this can deploy both os x and windows for me via an os x server? I've been doing some googleing but most documents are either too old or are about deploying one or the other. I have a reference machine ready with both 10.6.2 and xp pro ready to use and syspreped. Will this take images and deploy them out ghostcast style?

[steventaylor]

Yes you can deploy both from the server in multixcast mode, sometimes this can be very very slow though. I believe this is something to do with the the image collection but I've not had time to check this out at the moment.

 

I started off with the server way but I have recently been using it on a number of portable USB Drives and doing dual boot machines in a much shorter time.

 

Just carbon copy clone your latest machine with a basic build, then boot from the USB drive and install Deploy Studio with the name localhost, don't start the services and you should have no problems. You can then carbon copy this onto several other USB Drives.

 

Steve