Cloning iMac HDD

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Lordpiet

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Hey everyone

We have about 2-4 iMac's that duel boot to win 8.1 and I just want to know is there a way we can clone the HDD and re-deploy it?? I have tried Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) but it does not give me the option to clone both the Mac and Win partitions.

Has any one done this and what software did you use?

Regards
LP
 
Apologies for the derail - but such an incredibly stupid question does not deserve a thread of its own... :whistle:

Having never done this before, if Drive A's contents = 300gb out of a total 500gb (total drive space), will Drive A cloned= 300gb/500gb/more or lessGB than the original drive?
 
Cassady said:
Apologies for the derail - but such an incredibly stupid question does not deserve a thread of its own... :whistle:

Having never done this before, if Drive A's contents = 300gb out of a total 500gb (total drive space), will Drive A cloned= 300gb/500gb/more or lessGB than the original drive?
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Typically 300Gb, unless the solution applies compression.
 
Are you moving it to another Mac?

In that case it would be simplest to start the one machine in Recovery Mode and then connecting the two with a Firewire or Thunderbolt cable and starting the target machine up while holding T.

Then simply run Disk Utility and copy the one drive to the other.

Using Disk Utility should also allow you to resize the partition on the larger drive after the fact without a drama.


****

If you aren't going Mac to Mac you can do the same thing using an external USB socket and following the same process.

Why people go for third party tools first before trying tried and tested first party tools is beyond me.
 
GreGorGy said:
Clonezilla should be able to make exact copies. Try that.
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I was thinking along the same lines.
SauRoNZA said:
Are you moving it to another Mac?
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He's setting up one machine with both osx and bootcamp windows and copying that setup across multiple machines.


SauRoNZA said:
Why people go for third party tools first before trying tried and tested first party tools is beyond me.
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Simplicity? Ease of use? Time?
 
I use superduper for the Mac partition and winclone for the boot camp partition. Works great.
 
bwana said:
I was thinking along the same lines. He's setting up one machine with both osx and bootcamp windows and copying that setup across multiple machines.


Simplicity? Ease of use? Time?
Click to expand...

Disk Utility is super simple and easier to use than CCC.

Time should be pretty much identical across all of them with read/write speed being the real limit.

And if it's a large deployment rather use OSX Server and do network based deployments.
 
SauRoNZA said:
Disk Utility is super simple and easier to use than CCC.

Time should be pretty much identical across all of them with read/write speed being the real limit.

And if it's a large deployment rather use OSX Server and do network based deployments.
Click to expand...

Can't say I know much about ccc but superduper is much easier than disk utility. You just click a button. Plus you can also do incremental backups with SD so it's an app worth having if you back up your data regularly.
 
Is it free? Them by all means go for it.

I use Time Machine for backups, no mess no fuss.
 
SauRoNZA said:
Is it free? Them by all means go for it.

I use Time Machine for backups, no mess no fuss.
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I used to do the same, until I was forced into a full restore -- way too slow IMO.
 
SauRoNZA said:
Disk Utility is super simple and easier to use than CCC.

Time should be pretty much identical across all of them with read/write speed being the real limit.

And if it's a large deployment rather use OSX Server and do network based deployments.
Click to expand...

Only if you're a very small shop (Apple's OSX server is known to not scale very well).

For anything larger: I'd suggest you look at toolsets Google uses -- chosen / built to manage > 40,000 Macs; most are open-source and/or free to use for smaller installations: Munki, Simian, PyMacAdmin, Puppet, ...

EDIT: here's a video covering how they manage their Macs https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/managing-macs-google-scale
 
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SauRoNZA said:
Is it free? Them by all means go for it.
Click to expand...
In fact it is free with basic functionality but I paid for the advanced features.

[)roi(];11653185 said:
I used to do the same, until I was forced into a full restore -- way too slow IMO.
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Could not agree more. Doing a restore after a hdd failure (cricket ball) proved to me that it was something I never ever wanted to do again. Now when something goes pear shaped I just pull the drive and pop in the backup drive. Job done.
 
Having jumped between machines four times in recent weeks since my own is going back for the third time on Monday I honestly can't say the Time Machine restore room all that long, and that's from a network share not a local backup.


That being said Thunderbolt Mac to Mac was 20 minutes and works great apart from the retardedly short cable.
 
Nah I meant actual transfer.

I'm not a fan of doing clean installs on Macs habitually as with windows, but when the opportunity presents itself I prefer to just so a Home Folder transfer, often nuking the Preferences and Application Support folders in the process for a good as clean fresh start.

Generally Just when I've had issues though.
 
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