For the past few days have been working on establishing a Mac cloning system for the Greenhouse, which involved creating perfect, virginal OS9 and OSX installs packed with all the apps, drivers, and configuration we need for the mulitmedia skills classes. Once built, we’ll be using Carbon Copy Cloner to wipe the drive of Macs that tire of student abuse and reinstall the whole schmoo in 20 minutes.
What threw me was the fact that 5 of our Macs wouldn’t boot from the FireWire drive containing the clone, while the others were perfectly happy. The bad ones would see the FW volume, start to boot from it, then hang. Took half a day and several false starts to figure out that this was a Mac firmware problem. Updating firmware throughout the lab allowed all machines to boot from FW.
Our army of clones is almost complete, bwa ha ha ha ha!!!
Your “fortune” at the top of the page quoted bowie:
“Took a trip on a gemini spaceship and I thought about you.” -Bowie
Unfortunately, this isn’t a Bowie song, he covered it on his latest album “Heathen”… It was originally written/performed by The Legendary Stardust Cowboy.
Just thought it might interest you…
“I did not know that, sir.”
Thanks for the pointer. All fixed.
Hey Scot, could you talk at more length about Carbon Copy Cloner, and whether you’d recommend it or not?
-Jim
Short version: CCC makes disk images or exact folder copies of entire hard drives or volumes, for use either with backup software, with ASR (Apple Software Restore), with NetBoot, or for plain old booting off of / restoring from/to FireWire drives. Pretty much an all-purpose tool. Made by an ex-Apple employee, I believe. It remembers all permissions, blesses system folders, grabs resource forks and hidden files, etc.
Free, thorough, and reliable. Totally recommended.
Hey there, was wonder if you could put some more stuff up in detail about what you’re doing the mac lab. I’ve searched the web for some resources on doing what you’re setting up at the Greenhouse, but have come up with only a few tutorials that I thought were a little complex.
Thanks,
Yusik
Yusik, your request is somewhat vague. What exactly do you want to know?
Scot,
Is there a version of CCC that works with OS9? Their web page only shows OSX?
Thanks,
-Jim
Jim, it’s OS9 only. I know there are imaging tools for OS9, but don’t know their names.