1st image made off of a System Restore disk

[johnemac]

Is there any hardware specific configurations on the gray restore disks? You mention they only build on the machine they ship with. Have you had any luck restoring the build to different hardware?

Do you see any issue with using the restore disks that came with the MacBook Air on a Mac Pro? It would be great to be able to use the MacBook Air disks since they have 10.5.2 on them and all of the iLife apps. But that wouldn’t work, would it?

[Patrick Fergus]

> Is there any hardware specific configurations on the gray restore disks?
> You mention they only build on the machine they ship with. Have you had
> any luck restoring the build to different hardware?

Apple’s restore discs recently (last few years) have only installed on the hardware they shipped with. This presents an issue when attempting to create a build that supports hardware where the machine-specific release of OS X is newer than the reference release (today’s shipping Early 2008 MacBook Pro with a machine-specific release of OS X is a good example). Once the reference release of OS X is newer than the machine-specific release, you should be able to return to building on any hardware you like.

Is it [i]possible[/i], for example, to restore a build created with the machine-specific release of OS X onto a machine that didn’t need the release? Usually, yes. I’m personally trying to use the machine-specific releases only when necessary and getting rid of them when I can return to a reference release.

> Do you see any issue with using the restore disks that came with the
> MacBook Air on a Mac Pro? It would be great to be able to use the
> MacBook Air disks since they have 10.5.2 on them and all of the iLife
> apps. But that wouldn’t work, would it?

I [i]think[/i] the MacBook Air installation discs would recognize that they were [i]not[/i] being installed on a MacBook Air and refuse to install. If you could create the build, it probably would restore successfully onto a Mac Pro.

Also, consider your OEM software licenses and whether you have licensing to cover all the machines you’ll be restoring onto. Your Apple rep (if you have one) would be able to give you more information about Apple’s licensing policies.

– Patrick

[johnemac]

Some good news. I’m able to run InstaDMG on the MacBook Air disks from a Mac Mini. This allows me to skip about a dozen Apple Updates I had to apply when using the retail disk. I am also able to boot from the build on a MacBook. I’ll take the build around and try to boot it on a variety of systems to see how it performs.

[thegooch49]

[quote][i]Some good news. I’m able to run InstaDMG on the MacBook Air disks from a Mac Mini. This allows me to skip about a dozen Apple Updates I had to apply when using the retail disk. I am also able to boot from the build on a MacBook. I’ll take the build around and try to boot it on a variety of systems to see how it performs.[/i][/quote]

What was the trick to make this work? I tried to image using Air disks on a Mac Pro, and it was no go. Did you modify your instaDMG script?

[Author]

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