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I would like to know the best practices or at least the method to do the following things that I am working on.

I have installed triple-boot OS (Windows 7, RHEL Linux and Mac OS 10.6) on iMac 7 using the rEFit tool.

The goal I want to achieve is to make disk images of each of the partitions of the OS so that I can restore and install the images of them on other Mac machines.

I already made a Windows 7 image through a script that I wrote with help of ntfsclone. I would like to know how to create a Linux image and a Mac OS image.

Will vanilla dd command like dd if=/dev/sda3 of=~/linux.img do the job? Mac OS partition can be imaged through the built-in disk utility as far as I know

Are the above methods workable to create a bootable image? Do I need to merge them somehow and if so, how? How can I include the EFI boot partition to make them bootable?

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Take a look at DeployStudio; I haven't tried this feature, but one of their example restore workflows splits the target disk in three partitions, restores a Mac OS X system (from a properly prepared .dmg image), a Windows system (IIRC from a WinClone image, not sure if it's compatible with ntfsclone), and a Linux system (from a .dd image). It's free, and supports both local and network restores. Setup can be a bit complex, so spend some time with the docs before plunging in.

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  • Got to go with Deploy Studio. We use it in a college environment to support ~80 macs and it does support multi OS deployments and seems quite solid and reliable. Certainly a big improvement over netboot/netrestore which is what we were using beforehand.
    – Rob Moir
    Aug 17, 2010 at 12:13

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