comp.sys.mac.advocacy

Alan Baker wrote:
> In article ,
> Steve de Mena wrote:
>
>> Alan Baker wrote:
>>
>>>>> Try "Installing Software over the Network
>>>>> When the installation disk image is configured, use the NetBoot pane in
>>>>> Server
>>>>> Admin to host it on the server. This allows any Mac OS X system on your
>>>>> network
>>>>> to be configured or updated quickly and easily." found on the top of page
>>>>> 4
>>>>> from
>>>>> the link Alan provided.
>>>> The "installation disk image" is an image of the entire startup
>>>> partition, OS X. Not a Photoshop package, or something like that.
>>>> (Blow up the graphic below also) "Configured" would be a brand new
>>>> install, "Updated" would be upgrading from one version of OS X to
>>>> another, for example.
>>> No. You are incorrect.
>>>
>>>> In the next paragraph it talks about how these disk images can be
>>>> chosen as a "Startup" target, which you couldn't do with a software
>>>> package.
>>> Sure you could. What does an Apple OS install disk do, if not startup
>>> the computer for the express purpose of performing an installation?
>> A photoshop or any application install image won't boot up by itself
>> without an OS loaded. These images load up and install operating
>> systems, period, before loading the startup partition on the computer.
>>
>> Steve
>
> Funny. Reality disagrees with you.
>
> You can *create* installation images with this software, Steve. You can
> create an image that will start up a Mac and instead of installing the
> OS, install whatever else you'd like.

No you can't. Find me an article, technote, or manual excerpt that
discusses how to do that.

The Netinstall process was basically a few addons to Netboot. There
are not a lot of "smarts" here.

What you are saying would require the process to somehow read boot
volumes (which could be RAID volumes requiring special drivers for
which it would have no way to load) and somehow surgically insert the
apps and all the appropriate files into this image, which basically
means it would have to load the OS with read/write access to
understand all the characteristics of the OS it was trying to install
to, that was not actually running.

Steve