Ghost Solution Suite

Hi 

 

I have a lab of 30 Intel Macs, running OS X 10.5. We are currently using GHost 11.5 to image our pc labs and it works great. Are there any problems on the mac side?. We are also experimenting with dual boot with Boot camp (OS X/XP). Can we backup  the whole drive using ghost 11.5?,. Will ghost backup OS X without any issues?. Can I backup and restore partitions?

 

Comments and/or suggestions are appreciated.

Since version 11.0 ghost can do abit of patch up of Mac and it can also update bootcamp. However yet ghost has no full support for MAC partitions, HFS+ filesystems or EFI boot patch up even though it can clone GPT disks. This is something we are looking into for the next release.

At the moment the only reliable option you would use is to clone sector-by-sector -ia switch. It does take much longer then regular cloning thou.

 

Hope this helps.

Hey Rob,

 

I managed to ghost a set of Intel Macs, the major issue was creating a dos boot disc to recognize the USB keyboard and mouse, as I recall I ended up using BART-PE but had to use a local image because it wouldn't recognize the NIC in the MAC.

 

Lee

Did you ghost os x as well or just the windows partition?

Rob,

 

It was entire drive.

How long did it take?

 

Rumour has it ghosting OS X is slow?.

Rumor is correct.... those MACS have 250Gb drives and they took almost an hour as I recall, don't hold me to that but I know it was faster than doing a MAC-to-MAC disc.

Yes, we would really really really like to have a HFS+ support for the next version. Our BartPE ghost solution is just so nice we'd love to use it for our Macs also. Testing software as we do we have to reimage the computer on a daily basis and sometimes even several times a day (Blue Screen of Death anyone? :) ).

Our Mac venture is pretty new and we thought there would be a "ghost for mac" but apparently not. All solutions I've seen so far are inferior to out BartPE and Ghost 11.5 solution for the Windows machines.

 

So please add HFS+ support... we want to "Ghost" our Macs too :)

 

 

You can ghost a mac now with no problem, unfortunately it takes the whole size of the drive or partition, not just the size of the data that is on the disk.

 

Yes I agree ghost is a really amazing product, but they really do need to get on the ball and add  HFS+ file support asap.

Yepp, we've tried that, but the time consumption is rather high when there is a 120Gb or larger drive in the machine.

 

We've actually tried doing a "partition to image" of the EFI and data partition (you can choose several partitions when making the image). And then doing a "image to disk" restore.

 

The Mac OS boots nicely but apparently something is not completly correct as our product fails and gives us a whitescreen at boot time when installed in this cloned OS. Our product never fails on a freshly installed machine from the OS DVD so ghost is to blame for something but we have no clue for what just yet. It's under investigation by our devs though. Can't describe our product more closly cos of the Non Disclosure Agreement I signed.

 

Two things. I am sorry to hear that your product doesn't work properly when ghosted. I agree with you it's time consuming to ghost down such large images, BUT beggars can't be choosers and it is the fastest solution we came up with, and we tried a lot of them.

 

Second you can choose multiple partitions when doing a partition to image??. If so I didn't know this.

 

Bottom line is Ghost needs to add mac os x support to ASAP.

 

 

Yes, we are very seriously considering HFS+ for the next release. We will be supporting EFI. However MAC EFI is not fully compliant with EFI standard (which requires more dev time) so other considerations to be taken into account. I do not know whether we will be supporting managed MACs in the next release or not. MAC is becoming hot topic these days :)

 

You cannot really blame ghost because we officially do not support MAC cloning. Everything it does for you (hopefully nicely) is just a bonus :)

I'm not blaming ghost. I'm praising it :)

 

Just wondering if there couldn't be a middle way here. A hybrid between secor by sector and normal ghosting. If a EFI partition is found you get the option to sector-by-sector it and then do normal operation for the other partition/partitions you choose in a "partition to image" operation. That way you don't realy care about if the EFI data is conforming to standard.

 

Ah well I'm no hard drive viz so I don't know if that is even possible.. just thinking out loud :)

 

Anyway, we'r looking forward to having a complete ghost solution for all our needs both windows and mac.

Yes it is possible - smart sector cloning and we are also thinking about it. There are downsides to it. For instance because you do not store file-by-file then you cannot edit this image. However fully supporting HFS+ seems like much better alternative.