Image/Clone Entire Disk including OS X and Boot Camp Partitions

Question

Is it possible to clone an entire Mac disk including both OS X and Boot Camp partitions?

Background: My company is switching from PCs to Macs. We want to have a dual boot platform. Before I used to create and deploy Windows 7 images via Symantec Ghost. I am now looking for a similar solution or the least time consuming solution to deploy a customized dual boot platform to all of our workstations (all iMac computers).

Solution 1

Take a look at DeployStudio. It's a free imaging tool that works with Macs, and can image both OS X (HFS+ volume format) and Windows (NTFS volume format). Setup is a bit complicated, but once you get it set up it's pretty powerful. For a dual-boot setup, you'll have separate images for the two volumes, and a workflow with (at least) 3 steps: partition the target HD, restore OS X volume, restore Windows volume.

Update: Nathan Felton gave a presentation on "DeployStudio: Up and running in 60 minutes" at the Penn State U MacAdmins conference this year; video is here, slides here. The rest of the conference sessions are linked here; there's another on advanced DeployStudio workflows, one on managing and deploying dual boot systems, as well as one on Blast Image Config (which I'm completely unfamiliar with).

Solution 2

Take a look at CloneZilla.

CloneZilla can create USB boot disk bootable by both windows and mac, and able to clone the whole HDD perfectly fine. Cloning can be done via network, as well so you can just leave them all connected to your network, boot using the USB disk, and get them connected to the CloneZilla server that gives them the instruction and the image.

The clonezilla server itself can be run as a liveCD if you don't want to dedicate a PC or VM as your dedicated clonezilla server.

As Gordon has advised above, DeployStudio is good, but has a pretty steep learning curve, but it may be better in the long run. (Note: My workplace tried to get it running but the guy assigned to learn it back down and said its too complicated.. I haven't get cracking at it, but I really doubt its as complicated as he said)

Hope this helps.

Solution 3

Yes - Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Server works like a charm. It moves the entire hard drive contents and resizes (up or down) both the Mac OS and BootCamp (Windows 7) partitions in one go. No issues booting in either OS and no partition SSD alignment issues. You still need to enable trim on the MacOS partition using a third-party utility if you go with a non-Apple SSD (I am using an Intel 530 series SSD on my MacBook Pro). CloneZilla also works, but resizing the paritions is a bit tricky and they are not aligned by default for an SSD.

Comments

[Austin T French]

Oh geez, what sort of backwards company is this? The humanity! Have you looked at support.apple.com/kb/ht4178 ?

[Ramhound]

@Xited - What you want is indeed possible. Just clone the hdd like you always do. My original comment was trying to answer something different.