Specifications

98 Chapter 7 Working with Disks and Volumes
Imaging and Cloning Volumes Using ASR
You can use Apple Software Restore (ASR) to copy a disk image onto a volume or to
prepare disk images with checksum information for faster copies. ASR can perform file
copies, in which individual files are restored to a volume unless an identical file exists
there, and block copies, which restores entire disk images.
The asr tool doesn’t create the disk images. You use hdiutil to create disk images from
volumes or folders.
You must run ASR with root privileges. You cannot use ASR on read or write disk
images.
To image a boot volume:
1 Install and configure Mac OS X on the volume.
2 Restart from a different volume.
3 Make sure the volume you’re imaging has permissions enabled.
Use the following to verify permissions:
$ diskutil verifyPermissions [mount point|disk identifier|device node]
4 Use hditutil to make a read-write disk image of the volume.
See “Using hdiutil with System Images” on page 183.
5 Mount the disk image.
6 Remove cache files, host-specific preferences, and virtual memory files.
For examples of what files to remove, see the asr man page.
7 Unmount the volume and convert the read-write image to a read-only compressed
image:
$ hdiutil convert -format UDZO pathtoimage -o compressedimage
8 Prepare the image for duplication by adding checksum information:
$ sudo asr -imagescan compressedimage
To restore a volume from an image:
$ sudo asr -source compressedimage -target targetvolume -erase
For more information, see the asr man page.