Best Way to Image and Deploy Dual-Boot Macintosh?

macpulse asks: "What is the best way to image and deploy dual-boot Intel Macintosh desktops in an Educational environment? Our organization is getting ready to purchase dozens of new Intel Macs for each campus and we're not sure how to proceed. With Windows XP and Dell, we've simply used Symantec's Enterprise Ghost to deploy our images. Playing with the test Intel Macs we have, we are unable to get Ghost to work with the Mac. I've also played with Bombich's NetRestore product (which is FOSS!) but without much success. I'm curious how my fellow readers have resolved this issue. Thanks!"

From experience: DON'T

[tbo]

I know from experience that supporting dual-boot is a huge pain. We have a bunch of dual-boot Win XP / Linux machines (with an Xserve running OS X Server providing file and authentication services). Supporting a dual-boot machine is harder than supporting two single-boot machines. Why? Because each machine will typically spend almost all its time in only one OS. This means that automatic software updates, virus def updates , daily/weekly/monthly cron jobs, etc., won't happen on the other OS, and you'll have huge maintenance nightmares.

Figure out what OS each machine needs to run, and install that one only. Another poster suggested Parallels, which is a great way to handle things if you only occasionally need a non-OS X OS.

Re:Don't Partition

[fyngyrz]

Seconded. The only reasons to use Bootcamp are:

(1) cost [Parallels is very inexpensive, but not free]
(2) if you have high performance graphics requirements like games
(3) if you have multi core requirements.

If single core, non-accellerated performance will do, Parallels is a much better choice. Aside from being able to concurrently run OSX, XP and linux, the ability to work with the XP and linux OS images is superb; they're just files in the OSX filesystem. They're sandboxed, you can even isolate XP from the network entirely, which solves a whole *bunch* of malware problems, and you can back things up trivially.

The manufacturer also says they are looking at the multi core and accelerated 3D performance issues, and if those go away... poof to Bootcamp.

Re:DD

[tgd]

Yikes. Go download PING. It'll do the same thing in a LOT less time, and can do it over the network saving even more time.

An hour to image a machine?

The problem with DD is it has to write all the empty bits of the disk, too. A good imaging solution knows the filesystem and only writes the files. Since most desktops may have 5-6 gig of software on them by default, you don't want to be wasting time writing 80 or 100 gig of zeros.