making 1 usb stick have both windows and mac versions of the recovery usb
So i have been trying for a few days now to combine both versions onto 1 usb with little luck
Sometimes i get the mac one to start loading(then grinds to a halt and never really loads) and other times the windows works and mac doesnt(depending on the order of installing and such)
Anyway i am curious has anyone tried doing this themselves and had any luck as im starting to scratch my head at this while trying to find out whats wrong
just for the sake of pointing it out both on their own work fine(the iso/dmg)
now im not new to the whole scene of efi/bootmanager trouble as i run several machines(and usb sticks) with different versions of linux/mac/windows in all kinds of interesting ways just with acronis i seem to be having some issues :(
Well see the thing is with the company i work for(using my personal account to post stuff just to say) we service schools and companies(your usual IT guy) who are both windows and mac based
Now we got 1tb hds that are full of installers(windows 10/7/8 and a lot of osx versions and lots of linux based tools) and preinstalled os's with loads of diagnostic tools and such.
The idea i had was to add acronis to it now for the windows side of things that one works for windows pcs and anything normal intel based pc
But when it comes to the mac side of things you either dedicate the entire disk(trying this out on smaller drives of course beforehand) or you have no mac version to restore with now that would not be that bad but the windows based version refuses to load on mac's all together
And before you say "its because of how mac's bootloader loads" hear me out on this we have dozens of windows iso's that can be launched from any intel based mac that work flawlessly but the acronis bootable media iso's that get created
Now normally this is resolved by the chain of bootloaders we have installed on our drives(neogrub refind and a few more) so that the proper bootloader gets loaded first(in this case refind) but for some reason when we reach the proper bootloader to load the acronis iso it freezes up thus we got the idea of using the mac one(as the mac one alone works fine with all the bootloaders) but there comes the issue that any image we make of a mac based recovery image refuses to load up fully(infinite loading screen with the mac logo) unless we use an entire drive for the image it creates(kinda a waste of space)
So we have been trying to find a way for the past 4 weeks(on and off between jobs) to get it to work but so far no luck
And it got me thinking what if maybe just some day the mac version of acronis might be able to write to a partition instead of an entire disk that would solve this problem
Or that the mac version can make a bootable iso similar to its windows based one but then with all the tools needed for mac to run
Or that the windows version gains support for hfs+ partitions in due time
Its just my boss doesnt mind the idea of using the mac one to recover images(its easier then having to pull out the drive and use an none mac based machine to recover an image) but what he does mind is the fact that we have to use a sperate storage device sololy for the mac version
Granted its just 8 dollars for an 8gb usb stick and your set but thats yet an other usb stick to use and with that mentallity you can easilly have 20-30 usb sticks for all the kinds of installers and such(like we used to have at 1 point until i was tasked to make a 1tb extranal have everything on it and it being bootable from both windows and mac)
Right now we still use deploystudio(for entire image) and various ways of backing up(depending on the school) to backup user data>
But deploystudio depends on running a sperate machine(most often a beefy machine with several network ports) on the school/business's grounds to pull a set image from there to redo a broken machine and then use what ever backing up system that school/business uses to restore user data
But what we are moving to is using google drive for user data and acronis images for an base image and then pull down the required image from an ftp server over at our office so that we have a central location to store base images and user specific images
As that makes it 1 easier for us to keep track of what we have without physical travel(deploystudio machines are typically kept off being able to access the internet for security reasons) and 2 in case of disk failure no user data is generally lost and 3 from all the tools out there acronis seems to offer us exactly what we need(atleast the windows version does anyway)
Sorry for the long reply
Hello tigar,
I have created feature request for our development team to consider changing the usage of the whole removebale disk for bootable media.
I will update this thread as soon as this request is discussed and I get the reply.
Thank you.