Classroom and Lab Computing

Updated 05/19/2004
Copyright 2003-2004, Justin Elliott, Penn State University

These instructions apply to Mac OS X 10.3 and higher. There are older instructions for Mac OS X 10.2. 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 10.3.x
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 "Images" menu select New, Image From Folder...
   1. NOTE: Do NOT select "Image From Macintosh HD..." or won't be able to block restore to any volume larger than the master hard disk!
      
      
   
   
10. Save the image as Read/Write as you'll need to make changes to it later
    1. NOTE:"Image from Folder..." requires that the space to save the image is 2x larger as the source volume data size
       
       
    
    
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 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.