Hey all, as you know from the last video episode of Bauer-Power, I decided to do the Hackintosh thing with my Dell Mini 9 netbook. Everything installed fine, and all of the hardware works. The only problem? I am stuck on OSX version 10.5.2. The latest version of course is 10.5.7.
No problem right? Not exactly, you see I have the infamous Kalyway hacked version, and the combo updates from Apple kill the install. I have been trying various tutorials, but so far no joy.
So to avoid re-installing from scratch each time I hose my install after an attempted update, I decided I would get everything installed and working for version 10.5.2, and ghost the mother f^#ker! Then I can try all of the various update methods, and if I pooch the install, I can revert back to my image!
I found a cool free tool for creating backup ghost/clone images of OSX. It is called Carbon Copy Cloner. Here is a list of features from their website:
- Complete, bootable backups
- Simple interface for indicating exactly what you want to back up
- Restore using the same process used for backup
- Backups are non-proprietary, so you can browse them or use them with Migration Assistant
- Fast, incremental backups copy only the items that have changed since the last backup
- Archival backup archives items that have been deleted from the source
- Support for block-level disk-to-disk clones
- Support for backing up across the network to another Macintosh
- Back up to hard drives or to disk images
- Schedule backup tasks on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis, or you can indicate that a backup task should run when the backup device is attached (e.g. an iPod). You don't even need to be logged in for your backups to occur!
- CCC recognizes iPods specifically, allowing time for the iPod:iTunes synchronization to complete
- Built-in software update feature notifies you when updates are available
This utility isn’t very good for large corporate deployments of OSX, but then again most companies don’t use OSX for most workstations ;-P
This software is VERY good if you are a home Mac user though, and wish to have a fresh disk image of your hard drive, or regularly scheduled backups.
Any of you Mac guru’s know of any other free disk cloning tools for OSX? Care to share? Post you links in the comments. Also, if you know of a good way to update Kalyway to 10.5.7 I want to see a link to that too!