Casper Restore Partition

BrentSlater
Release Candidate Programs Tester

Hi Guys,

Just wondering if anyone still uses the a Casper Restore Partition?

We are building a whole bunch of 10.9.4 MacBook Pros that will be predominantly offsite and not always internet connectivity and we are thinking of having a Casper Restore Partition instead of the built-in Apple Recovery partition.

I am a bit unsure how and if creating a Casper Restore Partition is still possible.

Can anyone offer some advice?

Cheers

3 REPLIES 3

talkingmoose
Moderator
Moderator

I used the Restore partition for many years and if I were still supporting multiple machines in remote locations I'd continue using it. It's still there. Even if it weren't you'd still be able to partition a drive and install whatever OS and tools you want on it.

I never took advantage of the "This is a Restore partition" feature and just installed my own OS with ARD and SSH enabled. It allowed me to remotely troubleshoot and fix problems as well as completely re-image machines. It has its place and is not a substitute for the Recovery HD.

aleks_gylys
New Contributor

We still use restore partitions on all ~700 of our machines, and it works well. I build as slim an OS as possible, add the casper apps and whatever other tools I need (smultron, winclone, etc). I capture it with Composer as I would any OS base.
With new machines once they come online we resize/replace /Recovery HD with our /Restore at disk0s3. Then we'll put Windows at slice 4 on our dualboots.
You can use chflags to keep /Restore hidden.
I use a script/policy to deploy the latest restore base without really interrupting users.
There are some glitches here and there (like root user doesn't always auto-login) but overall its much more stable than netbooting. Hope that helps a bit.

emily
Valued Contributor III
Valued Contributor III

We used to create the Casper restore partition as part of our OS building process for imaging… now we just use AutoDMG, which creates the Recovery HD more fluidly, like a normal OS install would. It works wonderfully, and we need that Recovery HD there because it sounds like down the road we'll be implementing FileVault2 for all users.