I learned something today that I wanted to share with my loyal readers.
I needed to take the hardware back from a team and replace it with a different machine but with the same software. The machines in question are both iMac's. And here's how to do it without having to rebuild it.
Use Super-Duper to take a full disk image of the old machine and save it to an external FireWire drive.
Connect the FireWire drive to the new machine, insert the OSX Install DVD and reboot the machine with the Option key held down, once it's up, select the DVD and continue as if you were doing an install.
Once you get past the first couple of screens, select Utilities and Disk Utility.
In Disk Utility, both the volumes Macintosh HD (or whatever the local Boot volume is called) and the FireWire drive will be listed.
In Disk Utility, click on the current boot volume and click Restore.
Next to the Source input field, there is a button called Image. Click it and navigate to the FireWire drive and find the Disk Image you put there. Click the Image and click OK.
In the Destination input field, just drag the current boot volume from the left pane of Disk Utility.
Make sure you select the Erase destination check box, and then click Restore.
You'll get a progress bar that will tell you how long it will take. Once it's finished, there will be no message, but you'll see that the progress bar has gone away. Quit Disk Utility and quit the installer. When the installer is exiting, it will give you a few options. The one you need is to select the Startup Disk. Select the Macintosh HD volume that you just restored to and continue the restart process.
Once it comes back up, you'll have the same hardware, but a new install which will be the same as the image.
Simple, huh?
No comments:
Post a Comment