REQ - Assistance with Cloning a Mac Lab

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WoodyWest

macrumors newbie

Original poster

Jul 11, 2003

#1

I am going to be teaching in a lab containing 30 iMacs (BOTH tray-loaders and slots)... They are currently running MAC OS 8.6. I would like to "clone" them to operate with OS 9.2.2 and the software "I" select. With this in mind, I have a couple of questions:

Can I setup 1 machine the way I want, "clone" it, and successfully transfer it to ALL the different iMac models(tray- and slot-loaders) I have in the lab?
I have a network operating Appleshare IP 6.2 and an iMac with an external CDRW... which would be easier for creating/transferring the image to the other machines?
Does anyone have experience in doing this and can either give me step-by-step instructions or an online resource(s) I can research myself?

Thanks in advance for any assistance you are able to throw my way!

wrc fan

macrumors 65816

Jul 12, 2003

#2

Re: REQ - Assistance with Cloning a Mac Lab

Can I setup 1 machine the way I want, "clone" it, and successfully transfer it to ALL the different iMac models(tray- and slot-loaders) I have in the lab?

Yes you can. Mac OS, unlike Windows, will let you move the hard drive around to different hardware and it will still work.

I have a network operating Appleshare IP 6.2 and an iMac with an external CDRW... which would be easier for creating/transferring the image to the other machines?

depending on the network connection and how much traffic it would have, using the CDRW would most likely be faster. Although if the image of the computer is over 700mb, then doing it over the network will be easier.

Does anyone have experience in doing this and can either give me step-by-step instructions or an online resource(s) I can research myself?

I used to work in a mac lab with over 100 macs. We used Apple Software restore and a disk image we created to clone all the macs. Usually we used CD-Rs, since the network was just a 10baseT switch, and would bog down just running 2 restores at once.

The main admin at my work was subscribed to this mailing list: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/maclabmanager

It's description is: Open forum for discussing management of Mac-based university labs.

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WannabeSQ

macrumors 6502

Jul 12, 2003

#3

I wonder if it would be easier to use Carbon Copy Cloner on a desktop mac, or with firewire IDE bridges, and just make copies of the hard drives? But I guess it would be too much work to extract all the hard drives. On second thought, I second the CD-R idea, or if they have DVD drives, use a DVD-R, maybe firewire, but not all the iMacs have it... i dunno. Why am I even posting this? Sorry