ASR

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JetStar's picture
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ASR

This has been a major problem for my school for a wile, and with no solution in site, here it goes. When a teacher computer at my school has its hard drive replaced, crashes often, or otherwise needs to be cleaned up, we will typically format the drive, and install Mac os 9 and all of the applications that we use by hand (like, I run the installer for each in every application). Now we are trying to use apple software restore as a fast way to have a fresh install of all of the applications that our teachers need. So, we make an image first for the labs of G3 AIO's that we have, since we wanted to bring the labs up to 9.2. Image is dumped to a firewire external drive, works fine for restore on our server, everything is fine. Now, we also have iMac tray loaders in our yearbook lab, and since they use different software, and we would like to matain one image for one particular type of machine, I make an image, and dump it to our server, which has worked before when I made an image of another lab of AIO's. Everything seems to going fine, I'm running all of the necessary scripts as the PDF directions say. I wanted to just see that everything is fine, so I started up ASR to see that it would restore. When I select that image, the box down at the bottom of the screen says "Invalid or missing checksum" or something to that effect. It will not let me restore. Now, if I do another image, it will give me the same message. Heres the major problem: it gives me that error message no mater what computer I make the image from, except AIO's (haven't tryed the desktop version, but I'm shure it's fine, since they use the same motherboard). Blue and Whites and iMacs (tray and slot loading) are what I have on campus but none of them want to make a good image. I know my middle school has used asr just fine on those types of machines... but the system admin doesn't know whats wrong ether. We have upgraded the firmware on these machines to the latest we have. I have no idea what could be wrong, you guys are my last hope here.

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Image size

How big is the image? I think that there is a file size limit of 2GB on those, so perhaps you tried to exceed that?

James M. Baker
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Why use ASR?

Can you not just boot from a CD, mount the drive image and copy the files to the reformatted drive?

That's all our IT department has been doing for several years.

Our IT set up one machine with all the applications installed, the preferences set, then made an image of that drive and copied it to all the other Macs.

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Re: ASR

Well, the images are about 600-800mb, so I don't think that I'm going over the limit. I've made an image of just the os on an iMac, so it's defanataly not that. Eeun: I guess we could do it that way, but not having to install the os is one of our main goals here, and just draging it over is a problem for some applications which install stuff in the system folder. Sad

Jeremy

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Hmmm...

It sounds like there might be a problem with one of your ASR scripts. I know the one that converts it to an ASR image does a checksum to it, so it sounds like it may be failing for some reason or other. Have you tired re-downloading the ASR stuff from Apple?

James M. Baker
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JetStar's picture
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Hmmm

I should try to redownload asr... but if the script is corrupted, wouldn't it create bad images of the G3 AIO's too? Beee

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Here's another thought

Have you tried running a disk repair utility on the disk you are imaging? I seem to recall a corrupted file or two on a disk I imaged gave me ASR headaches. It's been so long since I managed the Mac lab, I'm trying to remember things that tripped me up.

James M. Baker
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JetStar's picture
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That mite be it!

I remember running disk first aid when I was working with the AIO's, and I forgot with the iMacs. I'll try running ASR again on thursday, thanks guys.

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Just stumbled across this whi

Just stumbled across this while searching for something else...

I would use Disk Utility in 10.3 (it doesn't matter that your machines are running 9). You can boot off of a 10.3 installer CD (or install 10.3 to the external FW disk to run Disk Utility) and easily make images of hard disks and reimage them. I have found the new Disk Utility in 10.3 to be a valuable tool.

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ASR for OS 9...

is a total pain in the ass. You need a special version of Disk Copy that has the checksumming/ASR scanning tools. Apple, AFAIK, does not offer this version for download.

I agree that using OS X to manage your ASR functions would be easier. Disk Utility in 10.3 has ASR functions built-in, as does Carbon Copy Cloner (a great tool). Team that with NetRestore (an easy-to-use restore app for OS X made by the CCC programmer) and you have a simple, fast ASR solution.

Just a note: when/if your labs move to OS X, you'll *have* to use ASR to avoid manual installs. OS X *cannot* be drag-and-drop copied from one volume to another like OS 9 can.

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