Best Way to Image and Deploy Dual-Boot Macintosh?

macpulse asks: "What is the best way to image and deploy dual-boot Intel Macintosh desktops in an Educational environment? Our organization is getting ready to purchase dozens of new Intel Macs for each campus and we're not sure how to proceed. With Windows XP and Dell, we've simply used Symantec's Enterprise Ghost to deploy our images. Playing with the test Intel Macs we have, we are unable to get Ghost to work with the Mac. I've also played with Bombich's NetRestore product (which is FOSS!) but without much success. I'm curious how my fellow readers have resolved this issue. Thanks!"

Comments

Re:I would go with NetRestore

[Anubis350]

Sounds wierd, but how about a server on wheels for the imaging? roll it into the lab you're imaging and hook it up to the local switch in the room, no tie up on building network resources for other purposes either. It may sound like a better idea now since I havent slept in a while though :-P

NetRestore FTW!

[kid-noodle]

We had to work this out in a hurry after a sudden decision to buy 70 iMacs - NetRestore saved our butts!

We netboot to restore the OSX image, then simply roll the XP image as a post action. You can then reimage independently using netrestore. (We actually still use ghost for deploying some software, and the rest of our images - NetRestore is faster and easier!)

Our only initial problem was getting the NTFS partition there to roll to, as ntfs-utils (NetRestore uses these to work with the NTFS filesystem) was having none of creating it itself!

In theory you could automate the process entirely if you bypass bootcamp.

Our mac image takes roughly 6 minutes to deploy, in groups of 5-6 over a gig link, and weighs in at about 5 gig, excluding the xp image.