Who is using a Restore partition?

[robb1068]

Ok, completely unscientific polling time! I'm curious to hear who is building a separate Restore partition during Casper imaging. I'm putting the finishing touches on our 10.8 image process and I'm on the fence on whether I should continue building a Restore partition. We've done it forever, but the number of times that we've actually utilized the Restore partition "in-flight" is incredibly low.

I'm just wondering if now that 10.7 and 10.8 have a Recovery partition, it's time to shelve the Restore partition. Your comments are appreciated, thanks!

[dderusha]

We shelved it and removed the partition when we updated to 10.8. It was a great idea that Apple stole and made it even better. If we could modify Apple's restore partition and add the casper tools etc, it would make me smile for at least a week!
then you really wouldn't need netboot.

[gregp]

We don't today with our 10.8 process and never did previous to that. If the Mac was unbootable, we have a NetBoot server for troubleshooting. If the Mac is too messed up, then it gets re-imaged.

However, we'll probably have to add Recovery HD as we'd like to start using FileVault 2 and that requires it.

[evan_moon]

We didn't retain the Recovery Partition with our Lion rollout, but we ended up adding it back because we needed to enable FileVault 2.

We're keeping it with our 10.8 rollout (FV2). I personally find it useful when I need to do a simple OS re-install (although i have to run QuickAdd afterwards).

[Chris_Hafner]

We used to skip the restore partition but then we discovered two very important things.

1) You cannot use icloud.com to locate the laptop without it! Though you could use Prey or something like it

2) We're a private BYOD academy. Occasionally a student will leave the school and not want to submit to our de-Brewsterization process (I work for Brewster Academy and I thought the name was catchy.) Having the restore partition allows them to nuke their computer, and our licensed software without needing to ideologically submit to our process. A full restore is good enough for my audits ;-)

[ernstcs]

If you're talking a Restore partition that was normally used to image the primary Macintosh HD partition with Casper Imaging, we use to use that until our network in large lab locations got better, gigabit. Now we just image using NetBoot exclusively. We only used Restore partitions in Labs not offices.

If you're talking a Recovery partition, which I think some are confusing, I destroy the Recovery partition in labs upon imaging. Will likely have to keep it around in offices if I'm told to use FileVault2 for drive encryption.

[robb1068]

Thanks everyone for your responses... to Craig's point I'll add a bit of clarification to what I'm referring to... this would be a separate Restore partition in addition to the Recovery HD partition.

[mm2270]

We don't use them here either, and I have never used a Casper Restore partition in other positions. I sort of like the idea of one only because the Recovery HD, for as great as it is, can't be customized or modified at all to @dderusha's point. It would be awesome if we could modify it to include one or two additional basic tools, or even to remove some. For example, the Firmware Password Utility.app would be nice to rip out in some circumstances, as we don't want people to be able to reset it or set one up, We currently have all managed Macs with a FW password in place that end users don't know, partly because we don't want someone setting a password and then forgetting it!

I had tried once to look at a scripted way (or a manual way even) to edit the Recovery HD without completely breaking it, but its a complex beast. Like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma kind of complex. So I gave up.

[seabash]

Currently testing separate Casper Imaging configs: one w/ (Apple) "Recovery HD"; the other config also includes a (Casper) RESTORE partition. We primarily use Target Mode Imaging for Casper Imaging. Here's what we're after...

Fulfill a full-disk encryption mandate. This lead us to FileVault 2, which requires the Recovery HD.

We hope the RESTORE partition helps us (A) minimize WAN traffic between hundreds of stores, (B) avoid using NetBoot in said stores and (C) provide a consistent deployment methodology in most locations.

Anyone else using JAMF Restore partitions (again, not "Recovery HD")? Any rough edges to avoid?

[clifhirtle]

Pulling this thread back back out of way back machine... on a related note: anyone have any success in creating a customized Recovery HD with Casper Imaging?

Just went through steps located below to modify the default Utilities menu in the OS X Base System.dmg for latest version of 10.9.2 installer, but I am not seeing any of the applications I added as available options from the Utilities menu. Not sure if Mavericks nixed the ability to modify the InstallerMenuAdditions.plist file or what. Any thoughts?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1598564

[clifhirtle]

Update: got the Utilities menu customized, but appears Casper Imaging/Admin cannot launch due to some presumed frameworks/dependencies not available on Recovery HD. Based on presence of "rbframework.dylib" inside of /Casper Admin/Contents/MacOS, I'm assuming this may be a Ruby thing?

external image link

[talkingmoose]

Restore partition and Recovery HD are two very different things.

Restore partitions would be used in a situation such as a school library. You can image the Macs and include the Restore partition plus you can cache all installers on Restore as well. At the end of the week, a non-technical librarian could reboot to this drive and it should automatically launch Casper Imaging to reinstall the primary disk partition. This is an easy to way "refresh" the workstations.

I'm not crazy about the idea of trying to shoehorn Casper Imaging into the Recovery HD. It's another thing to have to manage and could change at any time with an Apple update. My advice would be "leave this to Apple".

[clifhirtle]

Sorry for terminology mix-up @talkingmoose. I was really just looking for a way to create a custom Casper USB restore tool, similar to the way that DeployStudio can generate custom USB restore keys. We have TB drives, but those get expensive and are largely overkill given that we pull all restore over the network. And NB has been a non-starter due to our network setup.

[cwaldrip]

@clifhirtle Did you ever have any success in getting Casper Imaging running on the Recovery partition?

[clifhirtle]

Partially. I got the menus modified but could never get the actual menu items to launch non-standard applications I added to the partition (like Casper imaging). Eventually we got the JAMF appliance and NetBoot working so it was easier to just set that for a specific imaging subnet and hold down N on boot.

[seanjsgallagher]

@talkingmoose

Would you happen too know where the documentation for this workflow might be? A long time ago we did the exact same thing but that was many years ago and I forget exactly how to do this.

Sean

[talkingmoose]

@seanjsgallagher, I couldn't really find anything giving specific details, but I think I'd avoid the old method anyway. Creating the Restore partition was a feature of Casper/Jamf Imaging when we could easily block copy the OS bits onto a drive.

Also, the setting to Hide Restore Partition now seems to be gone. Not sure when it was removed. Within the last year or two?

If you want to explore what it would take, you could probably script partitioning an existing Macintosh HD to create a secondary bootable macOS volume. You'd need to get macOS installed somehow. And you'd probably want to hide the partition at login to avoid casual browsing by your users.