Cloning an internal drive from an external bootable copy

Question

Hope this makes sense...
I work in an edit facility using Avid that's only recommended to use with 10.5.5 and some of our machines run 10.5.8. My thought was to create a bootable external disk image from one of our "good" edit computers and then wipe the hard drive of a 10.5.8 machine, replacing it with the 10.5.5 image. Is this possible or will it muck up the towers I'm replacing with the external disk image?

Answer 1

As long as these other computers do not require a later version of OS X, then it's quite possible. The two basic steps are:
1. Repair the hard drive and permissions of the HDD you are going to clone.
2. Clone the drive to the external drive.
3. Boot each target computer from the external drive; Restore the clone from external to internal.
Boot from your OS X Installer disc. Select the language. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Select the internal HDD from the sidebar and click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. Click on the Repair Permissions button.
a. Select the External volume from the sidebar.
b. Click on the Restore tab in Disk Utility's main window.
c. Check the box labeled "Erase destination."
d. Select the External volume from the sidebar and drag it to the "Destination" entry field.
e. Select the Internal volume from the sidebar and drag it to the "Source" entry field.
f. Click on the Restore button.
Use the external clone to boot one of the target computers. Repeat the above steps but reverse the "Source" and "Destination" fields. "Source" becomes the External volume and "Destination" becomes the target computer.