INSTADMG IS ONLY LACKING ONE THING… [PART 1]

[EDIT] - InstaDMG has been deprecated in favor of AutoDMG, which I also write about.

And that is documentation.

Let me start off by linking you to InstaDMG, and telling you that it works great. After that I’ll have to let you know that the documentation was last updated at the end of 2010, so it isn’t very helpful when attempting to create an image for Lion or Mountain Lion. Well, never fear, because I am about to walk you through the process. This is going to be a four part series.

This first section is going to be about creating a clean, never booted image.

The second section will focus on basic system configuration/adding packages to that image

And finally the third and final section will talk about creating a recovery partition if you need one.

So, on to the materials…

BASE IMAGE FUN #

The first thing to do would be to run:

svn checkout http://instadmg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk instadmg

in order to download the newest version if InstaDMG. Oh, did I mention this is a CLI tool? Anyway, I recommend putting it right in ~/ because that is the easiest place to access it. At this point, you will need to get the source material setup for your disk image. In the case of Lion or Mountain Lion, this means moving the InstallESD.dmg to

~/instadmg/InstallerFiles/InstallerDiscs/InstallESD.dmg

To get the InstallESD, you will need to have the latest copy of Install OS X Lion/Mountain Lion.app downloaded from the app store.

CATALOGS #

Now that we have our Lion/Mountain Lion base image ready, lets take a look at the catalog files found in ~/instadmg/AddOns/InstaUp2Date/CatalogFiles. Each catalog has a different set of instructions in it depending on what you are trying to accomplish. The defaults are simply OS updates for each OS version InstaDMG supports. For us, these will be 10.7/10.8_vanilla.catalog.

Here is a picture of a sample catalog -

So here we have just a few OS updates to ensure the system is ‘up2date.’ The format for these is ‘update name’’download link’’SHA1 encryption key’

Finally, we get to the good part…

IMAGE MAKING GOODNESS #

So now we are at the final step – creating a dmg that is ready to be deployed. Make sure you are in ~/instadmg/AddOns/InstaUp2Date/ and then do

./instaUp2Date.py -p 10.8_vanilla

Wait for a little bit.. and then bam. Your output dmg will be in ~/instadmg/OutputFiles/

It is now ready to be pushed out via ASR. The command might look something like this:

sudo asr restore -source /pathto/10.8\Vanilla.dmg -target/Volumes/pathtodisk -erase -noverify

And the deed is done! Next time we will talk about adding packages and basic system configurations to our image.

blogpost –edit Consolidated future posts to a total of 3 on InstaDMG rather than 4.