Fear has big eyes, or HDD cloning with MAC OS and Win XP in the classroom

Good all the time of day!
In this article, I will talk about how I tried to “make friends” with MAC OS and Win XP on a single macmini and extend this union to 12 similar computers of the computer science class at a secondary specialized educational institution (college).

"Only the song is not about ..."

To be honest, the article was conceived rather not in order to describe the technical side of the question (because for this part on the Internet you can find everything in parts and put it together), but in order to beginner sysadmins, enikei or computer science teachers in educational institutions, on me, they found everything in one place, without being distracted from the educational process. Well, and once again highlight some of the problems in the field of IT in our educational institutions.

Prehistory

By education I am ... a biologist. And although I never worked in my specialty, this fact greatly influences my “career” and approach to fulfilling my duties. Performing by and large functions of enikey, and amusing myself with the sweet thought that I am a “system administrator”, I work at a forestry college as a kind of “electronic engineer”. Such is the rate.
There are about 120 machines in the college, united partly into a peer-to-peer network (I hope that I will raise the domain anyway, but so far the matter has not gone beyond talking about it and the oral consent of the director, because it is very difficult to explain to different deputies, accountants and economists, for what it is needed, but it’s rather my problems, not theirs). There are 5 computer classes. One of these classes is equipped with macmini computers.
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Before working in college, I never saw macmini, I did not use mac, and I only heard about an apple that it is “expensive”, “high-quality” and “not enough in Russia”. But thank God that I had some experience with linux. By that time, I transferred my home PC and laptop to ubuntu, a bit “fumbled” FreeNAS and Debian. And most importantly, after exploring linux, I COMPLETELY revised my attitude towards Microsoft software, Microsoft policy and the education of the younger generation in these conditions ...

There is no sadder story in the world than by whim deceived children ...

I will describe the class:
3 new PCs with a 7-i version on i3 / 2GB / 500GB, 1 old PC with an XP version, and 13 macmini, one of which
XP "beast edishn" and shabby inadvertently Makovsky section, and on 12 others in all its glory Windows Vista "business edishn", which was installed in parallel with the OS X "snow leopard" using the bootcamp, but in fact is the only system on this computer. And although, she, it seems, and licensed, but after the update, the activation "flies" (here I did not go into it). At the same time, everything is mocked up, something is constantly not working, the kids are breaking something (tearing a button, for example, from a wonderful aluminum keyboard ...), little white boxes, covered with a layer of dirt ... My question is, “a why not use the licensed software from apple, instead of ... mmm ... THIS? ”, I received the answer that“ there is no one knows anything ”,“ there is no photoshop, office, mathcade ”and so forth.

Sad? In my opinion, quite. And since these poppies were donated to the college for some program, no one has any idea how much it all costs and how many people dream about it (even though I myself am not an apple fan).
In general, I soon received a task to "everything worked, not slow down and everything was the same everywhere." And since, to solve the problem globally (replace the MS office with open or libre, look for analogs for the MAC OS of other software, preferably “open source”, since there is no money for the license, of course) I am not allowed yet, then I reluctantly decided to use the Perumian principle of lesser evil, to follow the path of XP + MAC OS.

Implementation

1) A “reference” computer was set up. To do this, do the following:
- Completely updated the “snow leopard” on one of the cars
- Demolished the Vista section completely (step, in principle, not necessary, just at first I planned to put XP on a virtual machine "inside" poppy)
- Using Boot camp Assistant created a partition for windows and installed Windows XP on this manual
By the way, it says that you only need the original disk with win XP sp2 or higher, and that different assemblies and multiboot disks a la "beast" will not work. It should be noted that, yes, at the very beginning, when the partition is only created using the wizard, the Assistant simply "does not see" the multidisk, but, although I did not check, if you install the original first, then you can replace it with any assembly . But, I repeat, these are just guesses.
- Updated XP sp2 to the current state, set up accounts, installed the necessary software
- Then began the search for what it is all to clone on the other poppies. My mistake was that I was only looking for Mack utilities for this purpose. He killed a lot of time, but did not achieve the result. For example, Carbon copy cloner refused to write the image of a partition from XP to an external screw (apparently due to the fact that it had the NTFS file system), etc. And so, when I was completely desperate, I decided just for the sake of interest to try the good old Clonezilla . Why did I not use it right away? Apparently, because I am a biologist by training ... For some reason I thought that since this is not a real bios and this is a Mac, then ... In general, Klonsilla did everything as best as possible. Quickly and accurately.
- Well, it remains only to change the NetBIOS names, IP and all that jazz

Conclusion

I must say that I was going to do something with this for a very long time, rummaged through Google, I thought that how was it. But I was hampered by some kind of fear of the unknown Apple product. And the solution to the problem took only one day off, in which I decided to go to work for free. Once again, I realized that in order to do something, you need to start doing it!

I hope that this experience will serve as such a biologists, system administrators like me.

PS
I hope that soon I will be able to change the situation in college. I plan to carry out some educational work with colleagues on the topic of open source software and piracy, implement libre office and thunderbird instead of MS office and The Bat, reorganize the college’s IT infrastructure, raise the domain. The electronic system of applications and the portal with news, instructions, etc. are already in full swing. within the network.

Well, and once again, I express my deepest gratitude and respect to all the open source developers, and in particular, Clonezilla!
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After writing the article there were more options:

1) From a Mongi user using the dd utility
2) With the help of Winclone (I stumbled upon it when I could not use Clonzilla due to the fact that the CD-drive did not work on one of the MacMini)
Did this:
- Installed Winclone on a working machine
- With its help, I made an image of the boot camp section
- Copied the resulting image to external hdd (formatted in Mac OS Extended Journaled )
- Installed Winclone on the target machine with non-working drive
- Restored the boot camp partition by selecting an image from an external hdd (by the way, the fact that the size of the bootcamp partition on the target machine was greater than that of the original one did not affect the result)
3) Well, and if you raise the server with clonezilla, you can also clone disks and partitions, using not the drive, but the network load