Boot Camp

[#1]

Does anyone have any tips and tricks for creating a Boot Camp partition? I know how to do this within Capser, I hope, but my question is more related to making the actual winclone image. Is there any sysprep necessary, any other special considerations I need to make regarding the image?

I would really appreciate any help I can help.

-Robert

[jarednichols]

Sysprep is the major thing you need to do. This guide seems like a good start.

http://www.vernalex.com/guides/sysprep/

good luck on the dark side :)
---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Infrastructure & Operations
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[jstrauss]

What I've done is configure the Windows side as I like it, Sysprep it, boot back into the Mac partition, use Winclone to capture the partition, and upload the .winclone file into Casper Admin. The Winclone setup process will guide you through everything.

Then (and probably unrelated to Robert's question)...

I'm getting the error that my Windows partition isn't big enough for the Winclone image I'm deploying to the machine. The Winclone image is just over 5 GB and the partition is over 20 GB. Any ideas? I'm using a compiled image with 7.1 using the NTFS option the Additional Partitions tab in the configuration.

Thanks :)

[tlarkin]

If you dig through the email archives I have posted many tips on how to create a windows image for a Mac. I have not used winclone in conjunction with Casper 7 yet, as this year we are not doing a dual boot image at all.

If you use the Microsoft Networking client you must use sysprep in your images, because you cannot have duplicate computer names on the network. If you are a Novell shop, you can uninstall the MS Networking client and not run system prep as Novell could care less if you have duplicate computer names on the same subnets.

I will outline some good basic practices as I used to create our windows images at my old job and we used Zen from Novell for PXE booting and imaging. I even wrote an interactive shell script that would list a number of images to use and then it would automate the process...

Here are the very basic steps, if you have any specific questions ask them specifically:

1) Create the boot camp partition and install Windows like you normally would. Install all desired apps, set all configurations that you would want in a base image.

2) Once that is done I like to boot into recovery console mode, this may not be available on Vista, and run a chkdsk /r. This goes through and fixes and optimises the file system of your windows. In my findings it even shaved off a few gigs of Windows junk files to make my image smaller.

3) Boot back into windows, run CCCleaner, clear and flush all logs, and seal it with sysprep it (if needed), then shut it down

4) Target mode boot that mac into another one and use WInclone to make an image of the Windows partition.

5) upload it via Casper Admin and set it's prorities.

Now, like I said I have not used this with 7, so the new features I have not tried out and it is probably way easier to do than I did last year. However, I was able to reimage 6,000 Macbooks with a dual boot image last year over the summer and it worked out just fine. I did my imaging by invoking it in a shell script.

You can see what I did on my site here:

http://tlarkin.com/tech/shell-script-create-image-file-your-boot-camp-installation

http://tlarkin.com/tech/shell-script-post-image-machine-boot-camp-partition

http://tlarkin.com/tech/managed-dual-booting-casper

These were scripts supplied by the first resource kit from JAMF, and I am not sure if they ever made it into the final release.

So basically, after the OS X image is done it runs that shell script, which creates the partition and pulls the windows image down. There are files that need to be present so that link from bombich may not work but I still have those files and I can post them on my site if need be.

-Tom

[#5]

Dear Robert,

I did the same steps that Thomas did for Sysprep, but I also used the tool
compname.exe to change the name of the machine based on an IP address.
Since we wanted the windows to be part of an AD, we had to use also netdom to
join them to the domain

you can follow all in this link:

http://www.myitcommunity.com/articles/15/print_view.asp?id=6991

I was using before the scripts from Casper 6 but since Casper 7 I do not need
them anymore. We use Winclone to make the image (remember to select for ARD
under Preferences) and then copy the image to Casper Admin and you would then
be able to select this image for deploying

I am even using the partition tool from Casper Imaging for creating the bootcamp
partitiion (before I had an script using diskutil).

Good luck.

cheers

Carmelo Lopez Portilla

ITS EMBL Heidelberg
Tel. +49 (0) 6221 387 8444
Fax +49 (0) 6221 387 8517
email: lopez at embl.de

[Bukira]

For those of you who might be interested, attached is my article for MacTech on imaging Macs with XP and Vista using Casper, it works and a few others on this list have used it successfully, it was pre 7.0 and winclone, but might help

I cna forward the scripts as a zip and NTFS tools to anyone who wants them

Cheers

Criss

Criss Myers
Senior Customer Support Analyst (Mac Services)
Apple Certified Technical Coordinator v10.5
LIS Business Support Team
Library 301
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
Ex 5054
01772 895054