Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Installing Macbooks Pro's all in the same way

Yzord

Yzord

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 21, 2010
93
12
At my work, large high school, we are experimenting with Macbooks pro's to see if these are much more stable then windows system for editing movies etc.

Normally we use Windows based machines and thoese are all imaged with the same image trough Ghost.

We want to use a structure, so we can image all Macbooks at the same time.
So i thought to do the following:

Installing a Macbook Pro with all the software it needs for editing movies, pictures and so on. After that start up Time Warp for backing up the whole OS. After that, get a fresh new macbook pro, start up Time Warp and restore the backup from the first macbook pro.

This sounds easy, and if everything is right, it should be, but somehow i do think i forget something.

Is this a good way for making all the same macbooks? or is there any better software around who could fix this for me?

Please do not shoot me for it, but i never used a macbook pro and it's software, cause we always worked with Windows.
 
You can do this with a larger USB flash drive (depends on the software you install on the reference MBP) or with a dedicated external hard disk.

Here is what you can do (just as an example):
1. Create two partitions on a USB flash drive or dedicated external hard disk (FireWire 800, if possible), one for the minimal OS installation and one for the restore disk image. Disk Utility helps you here. The partition scheme must be GUID partition table (GPT).
2. Now install Mac OS X (minimal installation is sufficient) on the first partition.
3. Restart your Mac from this new installation, open Disk Utility, select the hard disk of the reference MBP and click the new image symbol in the Disk Utility toolbar. Save the disk image as a compressed disk image, so that the restores are quicker (less data to read from a disk).
4. Restart your Mac again, but use now the internal hard disk. You have now a bootable Mac OS X installation and a restore disk image on your USB flash drive or external hard disk.
5. Go now to each MBP, start from the USB flash drive or external hard disk, open Disk Utility and use the restore function to overwrite the contents of the internal hard disk of each MBP with the contents of the restore disk image.
6. Done.

If you do it for the first time, it is probably a bit more complicated, but i'm sure you will find out how you can do it.
 
Thanks for the answer, i will try it out. And yes, sorry, i meant Time Machine :)
 
I tried the last method, and it worked :) very nice.

But i have a small question...can i access a boot menu before the MBP starts his OS?
 
Yzord said:
I tried the last method, and it worked :) very nice.

But i have a small question...can i access a boot menu before the MBP starts his OS?
Click to expand...

Yes, hold down the alt/option key when starting the computer and you'll get to choose the boot device.
 
Carbon Copy Cloner has already been mentioned. It also works nicely with Deploy Studio. http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html


I'm assuming you also run a server somewhere (no clue if it also works without one)

You create an image from a freshly installed machine and load that into deploy studio.
With netboot (there are some good youtube vids on how to set it up) you can deploy the os from the server.

We use this process at my workplace to distribute clean installs after problems or even to update all the programs once in a while (it's quite a lot of work to do all those manually, so we just create a new image and send that out).

Keep in mind that the setup requires some work, it's not too difficult though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back