Mac experts - how to make a bootable image of your disk?
 

I want to basically do the same as what Ghost does for Windows but on a Mac. So I want to image it's drive, save image to DVD (and or to 2nd partition on the Mac) and then be able to restore it from boot cd and restore the image on the DVD (or from the 2nd partition on the Mac).

Is this possible and if so is there free software that can be used to do it?

Have a read of this.

In theory, fire up disk utility, use the "new disk image" option, select the drive, and then save it as a dvd master format (should end with .cdr).

It's possible retrospect might also create a bootable backup file of the HD.

Sounds like you want a bootable backup, is that correct? If so, the time machine will more or less do this. You'd get TM to backup to an external disk, and when you want a restore, boot from your OS X dvd (make sure it's running the same major OS version your machine is, ie; do NOT use a 10.5 DVD with 10.6 OS in the backup, it usually does not work) and use the restore from TM backup option.

What I have done in the past is to have retrospect backup my HD, and I have a small bootable partition on the backup disk, along with an install of retrospect. If I have a problem, I boot from it, fire up retrospect and do a full restore to the HD. Takes a while but it works.

Cheers Markus, yep that is correct was hoping for a bootable backup. Selling one of my Hackintosh machines and wanted to image the fresh install so incase the new owner screws it up they can just restore it to how it was when they go it.

Problem is all my external hdd's are fat32/ntfs and so can't use them in timemachine. Also I assigned all drive space to the install partition on the hackintosh when I should have done 2 partitions, 1 for install and 1 for storage.

I've either got to copy everything off of one of my externals and reformat to hfs or attempt to re-partition and shrink the existing partition to create some space to format an hfs partition. Or rebuild my hackintosh and make 2 partitions on it (seems best choice as can put backup image on that and new owner can move it off of there to an external drive when they get it.)

I used Super Duper - and it was.

Best software which i found for Hackintosh is CCC(Carbon Copy Cloner),maybe help

I forgot about CCC. I believe it is by the same chap who did NetRestore (sadly now dead - sniff :( ). I've used it once or twice in the past and recall it being very easy to use, wouldn't surprise me if it allows you to create bootable media too.

Cheers for the replies. I had looked at CCC and SD but neither from what I read was going to give me bootable restore media.

What i've done is rebuild as above with 2 partitions. I have then done a disk image to master dvd from the install cd and disk utility. (I'm just trying a restore from this and if doesn't work will rebuild and use CCC to image the install partition)

This is saved to the 2nd partition and can be restored from by booting up with the install media. Then the person having it can move this off the 2nd partition to an external hard drive and save in a safe place allowing a restore back to a freshly built OSX if ever needed.

What I really wanted for my Hackintosh machines that i'm keeping was a util like Ghost that could image a disk with support for all file systems. I have OSX and Windows on mine and there isn't one tool i've found yet that works to do one image. So far only seems possible to do individual partition images due to the differing file systems which is just messy.

PING can apparently do what I want but when I tried it I didn't get the results it promised.

http://ping.windowsdream.com/

I'll add Deploy Studio into the mix

http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html

It can do bootable USB pen drives and Hard Drives

Whem imaging over the network to a server I've found the built in imaging tool to be unrelaible, so I use Super Duper to make the image and Deploy studio bootable media to restore it again.

With this tool you could image to external drive (or 2nd partition) > boot up from that partition (drive) and restore it to the main partition

This can work with Mac and PC partitions, I used Winclone to clone the NTFS part.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/25932/winclone

Guide for DS here, most of this you won't need but it does contain stuff that's relevant

http://web.me.com/driley/web/deploys...udio_Guide.pdf

:)

Cheers Mike, i'll have a read of that tomorrow - just about to log off.

Got the disk image to restore but obviously wiped my Hackintosh bootloader. However those clever Hackiontosh bods have thought of that and could install the bootloader from the install media menu too after doing the disk image restore. It just asks for the BSD of the disk and partition so was 0 and then 2. Entered that, it did the rest and rebooted and it has booted up to exactly how it was when I imaged it :cool:

Now to run it for a while to make sure it's stable.

i use super duper. i assume if my drive goes down, i'll boot into my copy drive and super duper it back to the new replacement one.

Mike beat me to it mentioning winclone. I've used that on the iMac to image the XP (NTFS) partition without issue. I've also restored using it, again, no issues at all.

Good point about deploystudio too, I believe that is what Mike Bombich (Mr NetRestore) now suggests people use instead of NR.

I still find it hard to believe though there isn't one tool that just does the whole lot i.e. supports all file systems and does the entire disk, not just partition by partition.

That PING is supposed to but I couldn't get it to work. Instead of just imaging the used space it tried to clone the entire 120gb disk and would still be running now if I hadn't killed it off over the weekend :rolleyes:

I think Ghost is the same, it 'might' work doing a sector copy but would take an eternity.

Years ago in my Uni when Leopard first came out, Computing dept used to use NetRestore for the Mac part and Ghost the Windows partition afterward.

It works but not really ideal

Cheers Mike. I tried my Ghost boot disk but it wouldn't have it due to the OSX partition. I'm actually really liking Time Machine and Disk Utility and the fact you can use the OS media DVD to restore backups from or an image.

So what i've done is a build of Leopard and backed it up in Time Machine in the 2nd partition on the disk and then a build of Snow Leopard and done the same and can change between which ever build fairly painlessly compared to doing a whole new build again. It's far easier anyway than trying to succeed in creating a bootable restore CD.

You get what you pay for.

B20 - I may not be as technical - I can only go on empirical evidence.

I backed up a whole disk including my Parallels Win XP machine and it's partition using Super Duper. If you plugged it into the USB it worked as if it were the bootable HD.

Trout cheers, i've not tried it only went on a quick read on the web about so could easily have missed it stating it does FAT32/NTFS partitions. I'll have another read.

Jack what do you mean?

Trout Parallels must do something clever with the file system as from the Super Duper page:

From the Windows side it's just as bad, neither Ghost or Acronis support HFS partitions. It's a shame about Ghost because it's been around donkeys years and still one of the best disk cloning utilities i've used just wish it did all file systems. Used to image Windows desktops in minutes with it years ago at work for disaster recovery tests.

Well found something that does image a disk no matter what file systems are in use:

http://clonezilla.org/

Very impressive, did 4 partitions on a 160gb disk with about 60gb used in roughly 2 hours. It also supports multicasting and various remote/network storage so great for business use too for imaging many machines at once. Would do a 6gb image in 12 minutes so not far off Ghost.

So now have an easily restoreable single backup of my laptop running XP, Win7 and OSX 10.6.4 which would take me far longer than 2 hours to rebuild from scratch in it's current state.