USB Imaging

[niacobelli]

Good afternoon everyone,

Working in a school we sometimes have to wipe and fresh install base configurations on classroom carts. What we have done in the past was to individually netboot each machine to do a erase and install. Is there a way to put that image with user accounts onto a flash drive and use asr through the command line in the Recovery Partition?

Thanks,
Nick

[Chris_Hafner]

There are many ways to accomplish this. However, I think it's as simple as:

Here's JAMFs guide to "Target Mode Imaging"
http://docs.jamf.com/9.99.0/casper-suite/administrator-guide/Target_Mode_Imaging.html

This will still try to pull the installer .dmg/.pkg/compiled config, from the network. However, I believe that you can still copy all of that stuff to the USB drive (for speed) by plugging the USB drive into a computer that has "Casper Admin", launching Casper Admin, dragging the USB drive icon into "Casper Admin" and the selecting "Replicate", to copy a full DP worth of stuff directly onto the drive.

I honestly don't remember if there are more steps to that because I don't image from USB drives. Someone else ought to be able to jump in here with such info. Otherwise, search TMI (Target Mode Imaging). I've seen other folks using DeployStudio for this (using a jamf quickadd package to connect the imaged computer to the jss after.

• As a fun experiment in the past, I created a bootable drive with a macoS "Server" and full, DP w/Casper Imaging and did pre-staged imaging from the local repository on the drive. This was AWESOME, but mostly pointless as I can do it far mroe quickly using netboot.