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I currently admin a small variety of Mac's at work. We have some G3/G4/G5/MBP/iBook/eMac/iMac. I've noticed that each system is configured slightly different and wanted to come up with some disk images of full installations pre-configured.

I would install the OS and non licensed software, custom scripts, and configuration. Then take a snapshot image of the drive and save it to an external.

In a nutshell, what I need to know is how many different images I am going to need.

  • Is this a horrible idea, and I should just reinstall on a per-computer basis?

  • Can I have a single images for all the G5's, another for the G4's, another for the G3's, etc?

  • Can I have an OS specific image that works across all machines? i.e: Tiger/PPC and Leopard/Intel

I would like to do this with as few images as possible, for maintenance reasons, but I understand there may be some underlying issues that would cause this not to work.

The installations will be done with Retail disks aswell, and not model specific disks if that matters at all. If anyone can shed some light on what some options for this would be, it would be greatly appreciated.

sysadmin1138
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  • possible duplicate of [A Single OSX image across multiple Apple platforms?](http://serverfault.com/questions/162228/a-single-osx-image-across-multiple-apple-platforms) – Dennis Williamson Jul 20 '10 at 14:51
  • Note: This has been crossposted at Super User as well: http://superuser.com/questions/165744/os-x-disk-image-across-various-apple-hardware – Chealion Jul 20 '10 at 15:36

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No, each machine's installation will be slightly different, and very significantly different if split between PPC and Intel chips obviously.

Chopper3
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Yes you can, The school district I worked for did it for labs, The only requirement is that the processor be the same architecture (PPC or Intel)

As for specific processor this is not a issue as long as the machines hardware meets the overall minimum requirements of the OS. for example a G5 could handle 10.5 where a G3 would not.

To simplify, if the OS Install disk would work on a system so will the Image.

Grishanko
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I wouldnt share an image between PPC And Intel machines. I am more curious as to if a Tiger 10.4.11 install would image across G4's and eMac's all the same.