[tinmanfoto]

Does anyone know an efficient way to make two Macs identical?
The closest thing I could come up with is using Disk Copy to image a Mac, and mount the image on another Mac that has an empty hard drive. That's like hard drive to hard drive. The problem is there were some preferences lost in the middle of that, like desktop image, desktop printers, and some alias didn't match up.

I was hoping to find a way to make a custom installer, and just install the same images onto different machines, instead of copying an image.

Any help?

[superlarry]

if you have OSX, then you can try this in the terminal while logged on as root (the superuser):

dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1

this is "convert and copy" (i think dd because cc is already used for C-programming). the toggles:
if = input file
of = output file

this works because UNIX is sweet and can treat hardware and software equally.
i think that the disk number is in accordance with the order they're mounted, starting with 0. for example, disk0 is the hard drive in my cube. disk1 is the cd or dvd once i insert one. since the second hard drive will already be present when you start up, i assume it will reserve disk1. anyone know how to check which disk number devices are? besides cataloging them on the terminal screen and looking for the drivers or your files ;c)

my warnings: this could take a while depending on the size of the disk to be copied. also, the hard drive receiving the information will have to be at *least* the size of the one you're copying, because i think dd copies the disk's free space as well.
hope this works - everyone feel free to clean up my explanation if possible.

[blot]

or if you're running OS9.x then you can get FWB Hard disk toolkit which allows you to do a device copy i.e. make identical copies of disk drives from an original disk, partition and all.