What are people using for dual boot management?

[lifelike]

Finally getting a chance to update classrooms and labs to Yosemite this summer, but one thing that might kill this advancement is the fact that BootPicker isn't compatible. BootPicker was great because we can boot up computers into the Mac OS and policies are able to run. The only remaining choices just give us the EFI boot options.

What are people using? Thanks in advance.

Matt

[bpavlov]

Take a look at:
Boot Runner and rEFInd

[pservedio]

Boot Runner boots to Mac OS like BootPicker. I'm switching to Boot Runner now in my labs. Testing Boot Runner with VM.

Anyone running VM as dual boot?

[Look]

We have been using ReFind the last couple of years, haven't started my investigation into next years solution yet.

[franton]

Much to my surprise, @nbalonso has managed to make ye olde fashioned BootPicker work with Yosemite.
my link text

[franton]

IMO I would avoid rEFInd. It exposes far too much low level stuff for me to be comfortable deploying. BootRunner from TwoCanoes is something i've worked with at other places and is far more dependable.

[tlarkin]

At my old job we had to do this one year. We had software that only ran on Windows and we had 8,000 Macs to support. Unfortunately, there was no native OS X app, and the vendor at the time was not going to develop a native app as they had plans to go web-based.

I used tools that were open source, that are now all in WinClone Pro to deploy Windows and OS X to the Macbooks. We had firmware passwords on our Macs so any EFI boot-picker was not an option. Instead we used Self Service to run the Unix command bless to set the Windows boot partition to be the next partition to boot from. Then we used I think the -nextonly flag so it would not permanently set the Mac to boot to Windows. The user was then allowed to reboot with no admin rights what-so-ever into Windows by running a Self Service policy. On the Windows side we had an object policy scoped to all devices that had the bootcamp.exe file on them (only Macs would have this file), and we ran an autoIT script that would mimic mouse clicks to automate them back into OS X by opening up that bootcamp.exe and selecting the option to reboot back into OS X.

Since the only purpose was to run a single app we auto launched that specific app during a Windows login, and then forced a reboot when clients terminated that process via the object policy. It was all automated and for the most part worked. We did experience some hiccups here and there but we had documented workarounds for all those edge cases.

[davidacland]

Bit of a different perspective but we've almost completely stopped dual boot installs in the past two years. We were doing it very regularly pre-2013, but the demand for it seems to have dried up recently (which we're glad about).

Did try VMs a few years ago for a small number of Macs in a school. The software did what it was supposed to but the processes around usage didn't fit well with shared use devices.