Jul 06, '05 09:42:00AM • Contributed by: dougalexander
I work at a school where we are rolling out a new, custom image of Tiger for our Mac clients, but I've found that creating an image of Tiger 10.4.1 isn't as easy as it was for Panther. One, Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner doesn't work quite right for Tiger yet, removing an easy approach, and two, Apple's Disk Utility creates images that make visible crucial system files like "etc" and "var", which absolutely can't be visible in the final image or else my users will certainly mess with them and kill the client system.
So, after a few days' work, I've come up with a procedure for creating the image that I thought I'd share. If you're working on other stuff, allow a day or two to complete this process -- it takes a while, but is worth it in the end when you can NetInstall multiple clients (or even better yet, use Multicast ASR to image many clients simultaneously - ooooh, geeky).
The process:
- Create the OS X 10.4 environment, install all Software Updates and third party apps. Configure everything as you want the ideal, vanilla client to be. For best results, follow Mike Bombich's instructions for "Mac OS X Lab Deployment (link goes to PDF).
- From a separately-booted partition or FireWire drive, create a "read-write" image of the the OS X install you just configured. Use the "Image from Folder..." command in Disk Utility. Don't use encryption.
- On a Mac with a DVD drive, mount the image in the Finder by double-clicking it.
- Insert the Mac OS X Tiger Install DVD and type the following commands in a Terminal window:
The above is taken directly from this KnowledgeBase article.$ cd /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/\ Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg/Contents/Resources $ sudo ./SetHidden /Volumes/mounted_image_name hidden_MacOS9 - Unmount the disk image by clicking the "eject" icon in the Finder window.
- Convert the image to "compressed" format using Disk Utility. This will take several minutes.
- Scan the image for Restore, also using Disk Utility. This will also take several minutes. Be patient.
- Once the image is compressed and scanned for restore, it's ready for use as a master image using Bombich's NetRestore.
