I advise a yearbook staff with a lab of various models purchased over the last eight years: everything from a white G3 iBook and candy-colored slot-loading iMacs to Mac Pros. All run either Tiger or Leopard.
I am looking for the most efficient way to reimage the lab computers. Currently, I have installed Leopard on an external firewire drive. On this drive, I have two images: a Tiger image and a Leopard image, that I use to reimage the hd in the computer I attach to. Here is my process:
1) Log into the admin user on the computer
2) Launch Sys Prefs
3) Set startup disk to the external drive that I have attached (no, I can't boot to it by rebooting and holding down the option key; it never shows up).
4) Restart
5) Launch Disk Utility
6) Restore the internal drive using one of the images on the external
7) Set startup disk to the internal drive
8) Restart
9) Rename computer to original name
This works fine and is obviously faster than installing from a disk then reinstalling all the software, updates, and correcting the settings; however, I am not sure this is the most efficient approach.
I have tried to netboot to an image on my server, but I cannot get that to work; it finds it but never gets past the spinning gear on the Apple screen. I have tried restarting with the option key pressed as noted above.
So, you admins... I have a few questions:
1) how do you handle this process?
2) I have a second external drive i have tried to use to speed the process, but it will never boot from that drive no matter what computer it is attached to, even though I set it as the startup disk in sys prefs. Any ideas?
3) The old iMacs will not startup from the drive that works on the other computers I have used it for this reimaging. Is this because they are G3's and the external has Leopard installed? It works on the G4's+ but not those machines.
Hope this makes sense.
Thanks in advance...
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