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I have to deploy 5 OSX Macs with dual booting via Bootcamp into Windows 7.

What's the most efficient way to do this?

Many thanks

3 Answers3

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I recently did exactly this on 20 OSX systems. I just created a custom image, ran sysprep, captured the image with ImageX and then booted each Mac into the PE to apply the image with ImageX. It worked great! We tried to use Deploy Studio but it made a mess of the partition and left me with an unusable Win7 install. I'm curious to see if anyone has a better solution though, as I'm always up for improving efficiency!

Jesse Paxson
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To be honest, the most efficient way to do it for only 5 machines is to just do it manually. Any automated deployment solution is going to take longer to setup and maintain than just managing the machines on an individual basis.

In my environment we manage about 1200 machines of which about 300 are a mix of MacBooks and iMacs. All the Apple hardware dual boot MacOS 10.6 and Windows 7 x64. The MacOS deployment is done via Casper and the Windows deployment is done via MDT 2010. It definitely took some effort to get the two products to work together well enough to deploy both OSes properly. Ultimately, the Macs pull down their image from Casper via netboot which also takes care of partitioning the drive in preparation for Windows. Then the operators are instructed to insert a bootable CD that MDT creates which takes over doing the Windows installation. There's some custom scripting at the end of the MDT task sequence that uses the Windows BootCamp software to set the boot drive back to the MacOS partition. Users choose which OS to run using BootPicker.

Ryan Bolger
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I would simply use dd in the Terminal on Mac OS X to create an image of the whole hard drive. You can then use the Mac OS X DVD that also contains a Terminal and dd to write the image you made (which you can store on a USB HDD) to the hard drives of the other Macs (which I assume are identical).