OSX 10.4.8 or later cloning guide

[asbak]

Though cloning is a relatively straightforward operation, I went through hell trying to find an optimal solution. What seemed an easy an obvious excercise turned out to be trickier on my particular setup than I realised. Here's a HOWTO for those who want a simple straightforward solution to cloning their systems. Much if not most of this information has been shamelessly plagiarised from this forum, other posts on the Internet etc etc so thanks to all who "contributed" in advance.

 

Why clone?

 

- Your HD is about to die

- You want to install multiple systems on similar hardware

- You frequently reinstall and want to revert back to a working setup in the minimum amount of time

- You want to backup your system at any given time before performing potentially risky upgrades

- [insert your own reasons here]

 

 

Working methods (at least for me) for cloning Hackintosh using the JAS 10.4.8 PPF1 PPF2 (or similar) installation

 

 

- Use Ghost in DOS and clone disk to disk. Use Ghost 2003 (it supports SATA). Your harddisks need to be the same size or your destination drive will need to be larger. Problem: It is not possible to resize the partition or to clone to a smaller drive. Using Ghost is beyond the scope of this post, check the Internet for further details. Resizing HFS partitions appears to be a bit of a black art. I only managed in destroying my installations and eventually gave up.

 

- Use the JAS 10.4.8 or similar installation DVD, a USB harddisk and RsyncX. This option allows one to backup your entire installation to an image file which can then be restored to any sized harddisk, provided the uncompressed image isn't larger than the total harddisk size. Depending on how many IDE channels you have and whether SATA works on your motherboard, you may not need the USB drive. In my case, I needed 1 IDE channel for the harddisk, the 2nd channel for the DVD writer and didn't have spare working IDE or SATA interfaces for this excercise, hence the requirement for a USB drive.

 

 

To clone:

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1 - Install OSX 10.4.8 or whatever you're installing off on your blank harddisk in IDE1, configure it and patch it the way you want it. Add all updates, software etc. etc. Check the install guides in case you're uncertain how to install OSX on Hackintosh. You may also want to run Disk Verify and Check Permissions before starting the cloning operation.

 

2 - Once your system has been configured the way you want it, it is time to reboot. Plug in your blank or about to be formatted USB drive and reboot off your install DVD again. Once the installer has loaded, go to Disk Utility at the Installation screen and partition your USB drive with at least 2 HFS+ Journaled partitions and make sure it's large enough to hold your backup images and a working install of OSX which will be added later. You could label them OSX and OSX2 or whatever you want.

 

-Note - there appears to be a bizarre bug with DU because the only way I could get the DARWIN bootloader on harddisks was to use DU from the installation DVD during the installation process booted off the DVD. All attempts to partition a disk WITH a working bootloader from a running Hackintosh system installed with 10.4.8 failed.

 

3 - Now you have a partitioned USB drive with 2 HFS partitions (one for a working Hackintosh installation and the other for dmg images) go back to Disk Utility, highlight your working Hackintosh volume that we are going to clone. Click on File, New, Disk Image from disk0s1.

 

The "convert image" box will pop up asking for an image name and location to save to. You could call it disk0s1.10.4.8 or whatever you want. The location should be your USB drive partition OSX2. Make sure compression is turned on. There's not much point in encrypting unless you have a very good reason to do so. Click Save, sit back and wait for image backup to complete. This will take some time.

 

4 - Once the clone job completes, it's time for a reboot again. Remove the DVD and boot back into your working Hackintosh system. Copy the disk0s1.10.4.8.dmg image from your USB disk's OSX2 partition to your desktop. We're now going to restore this image (a working Hackintosh system) to your USB drive's OSX partition. Before we start, let's check the partitions on the USB drive first.

 

5 - Open Terminal. su - to root. Type fdisk /dev/rdisk1 (or whatever your USB drive is, you'll have to check)

Once you've located your USB drive, the 1st partition will be the one where the image will be restored to and which the system will be booting off. It needs to be set to active. There's a fair chance that it isn't in which case we have to do this:

 

fdisk -e /dev/rdisk1

p (print the partition layout to take a look)

flag 1 (to set partition one active)

w (to write the change)

It'll come back with a warning message, say y (yes) and make the change.

q (to quit fdisk)

 

fdisk /dev/rdisk1 should now show partition 1 with an * next to it indicating that it's active.

 

6 - We need to restore the dmg image to the OSX partition on the USB drive. For this excercise we will use RSyncX 2.1 which can be downloaded here.

 

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16814

 

Install it. It is located under Applications Utilities once installed.

 

7 - Load RSyncX. Mount the dmg image with Toast. Drag the mounted image as the source into RSyncX. Drag the OSX partition of the USB drive into the destination area on RsyncX. RsyncX options are:

Select Folder contents, archive, remove unmatched. Bootable source, make bootable OSX, run as admin

This will clone the image contents (mounted in Toast) to the OSX partition on the USB drive.

 

Click Synchronise and wait for job to complete.

 

8 - Once completed, the PC can be shut down. Disconnect the IDE drive and remove the boot DVD so that you can now test your USB drive's ability to boot as a fully working Hackintosh system. Boot your USB device, it should now load OSX. In case you see the b0 error while trying to bootstrap, it means that the wrong partition has been made active. You could boot your install DVD with -s and then check your partitions again on the USB drive to correct any issues.

 

9 - You can now use the USB drive to clone to other disks / partitions of any size whenever required. Remember to first partition any harddrives with Disk Utility booted from the installation DVD, otherwise you may have problems with a missing Darwin bootloader.

 

 

There are no doubt other and possibly quicker ways to accomplish this but this method has worked well for me.

[holyfield]

There is no any complicated steps needed to make a working clone of Mac OS X system disk. It does not matter are you using pure OS X or patched OS X.

 

NB! You couldn't make clone of running system! Please reboot your machine from USB or DVD setup disk. Choose language and after that from menu Utilities Disk Utility and use restore functionality.

 

Just drag on Restore tab page your source partition from left panel to source input and destination partition to destination partition and click Restore. Thats it!

 

If you are using multiple partitions on same hard drive, you just need use fdisk to point to the correct boot partition.