steventaylor

Once you have Deploy Studio working on the USB Bootable HDD it's really simple to collate new images and distribute images from it, I image all my macs off one 500gb USB HDD. Then I thought I better use Carbon Copy Cloner again to clone it onto another back up USB drive! If you need any help tomorrow please feel free to get hold of me at Blackpool City Learning Centre.

- It's a four stage process, if you follow each stage as seperated by the "-" in the previous post you should be ok. You only need Deploy Studio and Carbon Copy Cloner for the first part of the instructions for creating the bootable USB HDD which you will use to collect and roll out your images. Once you have a working bootable USB drive you can then rebuild your remaining macs (Mac Three) and the machine you used to create the usb hdd with your finished image at the end. You are just using that machine to get a bootable USB Drive with deploy studio installed, you wouldn't want Deploy Studio or Carbon Copy Cloner on your user machines. I have slightly altered my previous post for easier reading, see below: The process is as follows: You need three Macs to start with, the first to create a bootable usb or firewire HDD The second to create your images on A third to test your new images on on Boot up the first mac, do the apple software updates and install carbon copy cloner and deploy studio etc. Then set up Deploy Studio. Use Carbon Copy to copy this install onto a usb hdd You are now finished with this machine All you want from this process is to copy the mac os onto the USB drive and mae it bootable. this should have you copy of deploy studio which you will use later. - On mac two build ur master mac and do all apple software updates and any applications etc, restart ur machine. once restarted install Refit this is a bootpicker, just copy the efi folder from the application and paste it into the root of the machintosh HDD. Launch bootcamp in utilities, set ur hdd partitions (I tend to have my hdd 3/4 mac 1/4 windows of the overall size) put in your windows xp disk and the utility will resart ur machine and launch the set up. You will see the standard windows xp install screen (blue), accept the licence etc. Highlight the bootcamp drive then format as ntfs and xp will install etc. DO NOT SELECT LEAVE SYSTEM once restarted install bootcam off ur os x disk, reboot the machine and configure xp as you like it with ur updates and apps etc, run sysprep and shut down. - attached the USB HDD to mac two and boot from this then collect the two images (mac and xp) using deploy studio, the image will be saved to the USB HDD. - Attached the USB HDD to one of the other macs you need to build and boot from it by pressing alt at startup, select the option to restore multiple os, create your partition sizes and select your two images. then you should be done. If you follow this you should have no probs.

The process is as follows: Boot up a mac, do your updates and install carbon copy cloner and deploy studio etc. Set up Deploy Studio. Use Carbon Copy to copy this install onto a usb hdd - Build ur master mac and do all apple updates etc, restart ur machine. once restarted install Refit this is a bootpicker, just copy the efi folder into the root of the machintosh HDD. Launch bootcamp in utilities, set ur hdd partitions (I tend to have my hdd 3/4 mac 1/4 windows of the overall size) put in your windows xp disk and the utility will resart ur machine and launch the set up. You will see the standard windows xp install screen (blue), accept the licence etc. Highlight the bootcamp drive then format as ntfs and xp will install etc. DO NOT SELECT LEAVE SYSTEM once restarted install bootcam off ur os x disk, reboot the machine and configure xp as you like it with ur updates and apps etc, run sysprep and shut down. - attached the USB HDD and boot from this then collect the two images (mac and xp) using deploy studio, the image will be saved to the USB HDD. - Attached the USB HDD to one of the other macs you need to build and boot from it, select the option to restore multiple os and select your two images. If you follow this you should have no probs.

Are you sending the image to the same model of Mac etc?

Does your master computer boot into XP or are you talking about your deployed machine? if you master will not boot into XP it sounds like you didn't format the partion when you created the bootcamp install and you selected leave the current file system at the standard blue XP install screen.

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

You have a few options, set it up on a mac desktop with plenty of disk space or even set the share where the created images are stored to a firewire drive. Another solution which worked well for me before I set the server up (and is great if you do some rebuilds off site or want to minimize network traffic) is to clone your desktop mac onto a firewire drive, once cloned boot from this firewire drive and install deploy studio on it. It will need to be a decent size to store your created images on, I used 250gb Lacie rugged drive which was less than £60 from dabs. You then simply connect the firewire drive to the machine you wish to build and boot from the firewire drive, launch deploy studio and send your images to that machines hard drive. (it's a good way to get familiar with deploy studio and cloning). The deploy studio documentation tells you how to do it, just print it out (there isn't much info on it so so two pages to one sheet in B&W is best).

I have around a 100 dual boot Macs (imacs and laptops) after many trial and errors uing other products I use Deploy Studio with a customizable boot picker called Refit and it works a treat! Deploy Studio will make your life easier, with the new version you can edit the build after you have sent it out like adding new apps (not tried this yet though). Collection of your images is really simple you build your images as you would (not forgetting to sysprep your windows installation as normal if it's going on a domain).You boot from netboot or a usb stick, and you get a few options of create a master from a volume or deploy. if your deploiying you select if it's a triple or dual boot, the size of the partitions you want for each os. It then works it's magic resizing the partitions and formating them in ntfs for windows and hfs for the mac and you select. Then you simply select which image you want on which partitions.

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.