Cloning preconfigured Mac OS X installations

Especially since Apple supplies all the necessary tools 'out-of-the-box' as of Mac OS X 10.3. However, even with the upgrade to 10.3.3 not everything works as expected. The trick is to use Carbon Copy Cloner to create the image and Apples built-in Disk Utility to restore them.

The 'official way' (at least according to Disk Utility's Help section and man asr) is this:

• Create a new Image in Disk Utility (read-only)
• Apply the 'Scan Image for Restore' option
• Restore the Image

Pretty neat, huh? And all with just a few mouse-clicks from within a slick and integrated, cocoalicious Application.

Exce-hept, that two out of three attempts to scan the image failed with a refreshingly brief error message stating 'Internal Error'. Excuse me? My freakin' SMTP-Server is more verbose than that!

After first restarting Disk Utility and then the entire machine, I finally got a 'scanned image'. Good. However, I couldn't restore it. Not Good! I got a similarily non-descriptive error message but this time with an additional error number.

Okay, as a geek I steadfastly refused to do something manually that could be done automatically... So I created a second Image, this time using the commandline tool asr both for creation and scanning. To no avail...

Considering that the image was well over 3Gb, the process of multiple scans and two creations had so far lasted considerably longer than a second manual installation would have taken and I had stopped clocking the time as billable for more than an hour already.

Well, to make a long story short: Carbon Copy Cloner to the rescue! I simply changed two of the default settings: a) I clicked on Prepare for Apple Software Restore and b) on Create Disk Image on Target

The process went without a hitch. I briefly considered using CCC to restore the image, as well but as far as I can see, the only option to do so would be to mount the image and then select the mounted volume as source. This seemed a bit fishy so I decided to give Disk Utility a go at the new image. And this time it didn't fail me!

As I had mounted the eMacs hard drive in Firewire target mode to my powerbook I now unmounted it and restarted the eMac. This resulted in a blinking System folder icon. Duh! What had gone wrong?! I was close to throwing the whole pile of hardware out of the window!

In OS 8.x/9.x there is the concept of blessing a system, i.e. performing a trivial task to an otherwise perfect instance just to make it bootable. (One way of doing this was to simply move the Finder out of the System Folder and move it back in)

Apparently, this is still possible in OS X in a way... what I had to do was to remount the drive on the powerbook, select it as boot volume in the system preferences and reboot from it. After that, the eMac booted up just fine and has been working like a charm. I have since repeated the procedure with a a third machine using the same image. So in the end I spent something like two hours for the first machine, three hours for the second and 20 minutes for the third ;-)