How to Make a Master
System Disk Image for BIC/ASR

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Updated 08/19/2005
Copyright 2003-2005, Justin Elliott, Penn State University

These instructions apply to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). These instructions are largely based on the asr man pages.

1. Read the asr (Apple Software Restore) man page: Open terminal.app and enter "man asr". This isn't necessary, but it does a great job of explaining more of this process in detail.
2. Install Mac OS X on the master Mac and set it up the way you want it to work. Ie, Applications, printers, automated scripts, etc.
3. Boot up from another partition or External FireWire Hard Disk with Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger).
4. Login with an administrator account.
5. Enable Permissions on the Disk to Image (Assumes that the disk is named "Macintosh HD", of course):
   1. Select "Macintosh HD"
   2. In the menu bar, select "File" and then "Get Info"
      
      
      
   3. UN-check the "Ignore ownership on this volume" checkbox:
      
      
   
   
6. Launch Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities
   
7. Select the disk that will be imaged from (the master hard disk):
   
   
   
8. Click the "Repair Disk" button to fix any file system errors on the disk. If there are file system errors on the disk, they will be replicated in the image that you create and BIC/asr may not be able to mount a disk restored from a disk image with file system errors.
   
   
   
9. From the "File" menu select New, Disk Image From Folder...
   1. NOTE: Do NOT select "Disk Image from (Select a Device)..." or you won't be able to block restore to any volume larger than the master hard disk!
      
      
   
   
10. Choose a location to save the image (not on the volume being imaged), give it a name, and set the Image Format to read/write as you'll want to make changes to it later. Click Save.
    1. NOTE:When saving images as read/write or compressed, on OS versions before 10.4, required roughly two times as much free space on the volume to which you are saving the image as you have data on the source. (somewhat paraphrased from the Apple asr man page).
    
    
    
11. Unmount the original master Volume "Macintosh HD" FIRST:
    
    
    
12. And then mount the read-write master image:
    
    
    
13. Open the Terminal application from /Applications/Utilities:
    
    
    
14. In the terminal, become root and delete files: (Enter in the text after the %, which represents the shell prompt)
    
    % sudo -s
    % rm /Volumes/[NameOfDiskImageVolume]/var/db/BootCache.playlist
    % rm /Volumes/[NameOfDiskImageVolume]/var/db/volinfo.database
    % rm -r /Volumes/[NameOfDiskImageVolume]/var/vm/swap*
    
    
15. Quit out of the terminal application
16. Unmount the master disk image by dragging its white disk icon to the dock's eject icon
17. In Disk Utility:
    1. Images, Convert...
       
       
       
    2. Change the Image Format to compressed:
       
       
    
    
18. If you want to be able to verify the data restored, the image must be "Scanned for Restore" to add checksum data to the image
    1. In Disk Utility, under the Images menu item, select Scan Image for Restore...
       
       
    
    
19. Copy/Move the compressed and scanned image to the PSU Blast Image Config RestoreImages folder for easy access:
    
    
    
20. Master restore images can ALSO be stored on another hard disk, server volume, or via http download too. They're no longer restricted to just the RestoreImages folder. Read the demo run documentation for more information on how to access images on other volumes and sources.

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This page was last modified: 8/19/2005 10:36:22 AM.