[l008com]

I'm running a little Leopard Server. Now that FireWire is on the endangered species list, looks like I have to switch over to NetBooting. So I have the basic down pretty easy. The Install images are a piece of cake to make. And the NetBoot images are pretty easy too. I just take a spare drive, install OS X, set everything up the way I want, with all the utilities I need. Then I just use the System Image Utility to turn my volume into a NetBoot image. Its actually very easy.

But here is the million dollar question

How do I make netboot images for older OS's?
I have a firewire drive with three partitions on it. One has 10.3 installed, one has 10.4, and another has 10.5. Each partition is loaded up with all the utilities one needs to fix any and all software problems on OS X. Problem is, System Image Utility only seed the 10.5 volume. The rest don't exist.

• Can NetBoot on Leopard server older OS images?
• Is there some other way to make netboot images, a more "manual" kind of way?
• Surely I don't have to set up an entire 10.3 (and 10.4) server volume, just to use it's image creation tools to create these older images??

[JLL]

You should be able to do it by running older versions of System Image Utility.

The app can run locally on your own machine and the resulting image can be copied to the server.

[l008com]

I tried that but the 10.3 version of the app won't run at all :-( And I don't have the 10.4 version anywhere.

[Art Vandelay]

Nevermind, my suggestion won't work for what you're wanting to do.

[l008com]

So here's the final deal. You can use 10.5's imagine app to make a netboot image from 10.5 client. Same with 10.4 and 10.4's app. With 10.3, I had to do a full installation of OS X server, enable netboot, then image the disk and actually install it into the server. Only then would the imaging utility actually create the image properly. After jumping through all those hoops, I could move all 3 images to my 10.5 server. Hell of a lot of work, lets hope it pays off. So far netbooting has been quite buggy. Some times it works perfectly, some times it kernel panics.