PowerMac G5 and Carbon Copy Cloner

[rman2008]

Hello Everyone,

I have 17 Dual 2.0 Ghz G5's. As many of you know its a pain in the ass installing anc customizing every computer to your every need. I created a a cloned image of my "master" G5 and I intend to boot off that image using a firewire drive. If anyone has read the instructions for doing this, you need to boot off a seperate drive that has a usable system on it. The drive I was supplied with that had 10.2.6 refused to boot. I think that it needs to be 10.2.7 or later, because each version of the operating system after 10.2.7 has been specifically for the G5. If anyone knows anything about this please help. Also if anyone in the education-music field has G5's and is interested in sharing their experiences hit me up on AIM (rarballa). Thanks.

rman2008

 

[Doctor Q]

Gee, you have a lot of personal computers! One for you, one for your spouse, and one for each of your 15 kids, right? OK, just kidding. I understand - school computers.

By coincidence, I was cloning a system at school (not a G5) with Carbon Copy Cloner this morning.

I'm unsure about something in your description. Are you trying to boot each G5 off of its own internal disk, boot each G5 off an external firewire drive with the clone on it, or boot all of the G5s from a single firewire drive?

 

[rman2008]

good point...

My initial gameplan was to boot each G5 off a firewire drive manually. In other words walk to each one with the drive and boot off it.

However, booting off a single drive for all 17 of them sounds appealing, but how would I do that? NetBoot??

 

[Doctor Q]

Why aren't you copying your clone to each G5's internal drive? If you aren't going to change your master configuration very often, that would make life easier. They would all be the same as of today. But of course they would "evolve" separately.

If you are going to change the master configuration often, netbooting is a nice trick because you can just reclone the master each time. If you have one Mac with Mac OS X Server, you can netboot all of your other G5s off of it. Carbon Copy Cloner has an option to create a netboot image, so you'd have to re-clone with that option on. A netboot image is a folder on the server containing some control files plus the disk image (dmg) file of the boot disk image. I don't know about Panther, but in Jaguar I've found that Apple's own netboot-creation tools don't work reliably, while Carbon Copy Cloner does. If you netboot, you'd want to put each user's home directory on the server too.

 

[rman2008]

I understand somewhat about what you are saying. However netbooting might not be a good option. At this college, this lab would be strictly for music students, so they would not be using there traditional network username & password.

I am a little new to this Carbon Copy Cloner, so what do you mean by copying the cloned file to each G5? Thanks for all your help 2.

rman2008

EDIT: on the firewire drive the file that was cloned is called macintoshhd_ars.dmg (or something very similar). What do I do with that?

 

[Doctor Q]

Sounds like your goal is to copy the hard disk of one G5 to the hard disks of all of the other G5s. Carbon Copy Cloner lets you copy a bootable hard disk to another locally-mounted disk (not a network drive, for example), so it should let you do what you want as follows:

On the master G5:

(1) Set it up the way you want all of the G5s set up, including installing a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner on it.

(2) Connect the firewire drive to the G5.

(3) Run Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy of its hard disk on the firewire drive. Let it copy all files. You want a bootable result but you don't want to make a netboot image in this case.

(4) Disconnect the firewire drive.

On each of the other 16 G5s:

(1) Disconnect the G5 from your network.

(2) Connect the firewire drive.

(3) Boot the G5 off the firewire drive. You can hold down the Option key as you start up a G5 to see your choice of boot devices and pick one. In this case, you'll pick the firewire drive, not the local drive.

(4) Run Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the firewire disk (which at the moment is your boot disk, right?) over your internal G5 hard drive.

(5) Disconnect the firewire drive .

(6) Restart the G5 (which will now be from its local drive) and set the Sharing preference panes to give it its unique computer name. If you are using manual IP addresses, as opposed to DHCP, set the info in the Network preference pane too.

(7) Reconnect it to the network. We disconnected it since it had the network identity of the master until you finished step (6), and you don't want two machines with the same name and IP address on the network.

Note that this procedure wipes out all previous files on the G5s other than the master. If that is not a problem, you can repeat the clone procedure above as often as you change your G5 configuration.

Good luck!

 

[rman2008]

THANKS

Thanks a lot.

Now I have to go into the office tommorow and do it. Break ends on Sunday, so I've got a lot of work to do.

thanks again.

-rman2008