Will restore from disk image work with the hackintosh setup?

[jwalkermed]

Hey peeps, had a question for those of you with prior experience. I used tony's dual boot blog post to get win7/macox up and running. Now that I have everything set I wan to image my drives to streamline fresh installs in the future.

Will using disk utility to image my disk work fine if I want to restore from that in the future ( i.e. will it mess up my boot record?)

And will the same work with windows (use the build in imaging software to make an image and restore if I ever want to)?

Thanks

 

[tonymacx86]

IMO you'd be better off using Time Machine or SuperDuper to back up or clone your drive if you're planning on reinstalling. Then when you get your fresh install, you can restore your users from Time Machine, or files from SuperDuper backup. Or you can use Migration Assistant to move whole Users and Apps.

I keep most of my data (Documents, Pics, Music, Video, etc...) on a separate partition so that the system is free of important files. I started doing this back on my P4 Hackintosh and it stuck. Managed to bork the system quite a few times learning about kernel upgrades and point updates.

This way I pretty much only have to reinstall Apps after a fresh install. And if I have to test changes, I don't worry about losing data.

 

[jwalkermed]

I see. Yeah I always keep data and such on other drives or remotely stored on a server box. I, like you just mess with a lot of settings so it's easy to have a fresh image ready. Thanks for the information.

 

[Demerdland]

Hi,

Once you have a working full fresh install that you want to image
for future quick re-deployment, then you should use something
like cloneX (which will make a copy of the drive)

Later, you only need to reinstall chameleon to desired partition,prior to restoring the disk image to it with cloneX, which takes about no time.

Take it from a machead : cloneX's your friend !-)

 

[wlp5]

well, I found by experience that both time machine and carboncopycloner images cannot fix messed up bootloaders. I had trouble restoring from these using the install dvd, I still had to manually get to terminal and fix the bootloader afterwards...

 

[Demerdland]

yes, that's correct (except I'd rather fix the bootloader before restoring)
But apart from the bootloader, disk imaging for system deployment is the
best solution IMHO.

 

[jwalkermed]

Agreed, I'm definitely a disk imaging person, or at leave have been with all my windows boxes. Thanks for the tip.

 

[Jonnwhite]

A second complete install in addition might also be a good idea.