As part of re-inventing Frankenstein at work, I have to determine the best way to take an existing Mac with two Mac OS X 10.4.x partitions and upgrade it to two Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 partitions. Remotely.
Casper Imaging, part of JAMF Software’s Casper Suite, doesn’t seem to like installing Mac OS X 10.5 onto a partition while booted to Mac OS X 10.4.11. It’s essentially calling Apple’s Installer technology to install the new OS from a disk image of a Mac OS X 10.5 disk.
I finally got to test a new feature in Casper Admin for compiling a configuration (a group of items to install) into a monolithic disk image and then using Casper Imaging to lay that down on a partition using a block copy.
The compiled disk image for our Restore partition, which we boot into to image the main Macintosh HD, was about 3.6GB. Not big for a partition but still not like the old 200MB image I could install back in the Mac OS 9 days. The Yowsa! came when I went to install it. Not only was I able to install a Mac OS X 10.5 image while booted to 10.4.11 but the block copy was less than five minutes! Compared to “installing” the configuration, this was a savings of 50-80% in time.
My next test will be to copy this compiled configuration to a different distribution server and test from there. It will probably work, knowing JAMF. I found a “Compiled Configurations” folder with this disk image in the root of my local distribution point. This probably is the only thing that needs to be copied to other distribution points to make it work elsewhere.
Remember the Human 