WARNING: MINICLONE WILL IMMEDIATELY ERASE THE CONTENTS OF THE VOLUME YOU AIM IT AT, AND IT WILL NOT CHECK IF THIS IS OKAY. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

miniclone... Mac OS X's installation media includes a number of very useful tools for resetting passwords, diagnosing hardware issues, cloning drives, copying data, checking and repairing filesystems, managing disks, and even conducting forensics if you're so inclined. However, there are a number of situations in which these tools just don't work, notably when a whole-disk encryption (WDE) product is used to protect mobile data, such as on laptop systems. In this case in particular, a secondary bootable system drive is required with support for the underlying sector-level encryption. In general, though, it's really handy to be able to turn a USB drive into a bootable volume that'll boot up any Mac and be useful for fixing a wide range of issues.

miniclone is a script for creating a bootable clone of the currently running system on any target media, including thumb drives, flash drive, or other internal or external bootable media. Naturally, this is most useful with a keychain thumbdrive.

Known Issues

• miniclone is written in csh ... yes, that's right, csh ... get over it
• the first boot of a miniclone is pretty slow, especially on flash
• will currently only use the booted root volume as the source
• requires the use of the SetFile tool from the Developer Tools
• hasn't and won't be tested on Snow Leopard until PGP WDE supports it
• hasn't been run on Tiger for a really long time - please let me know if you can test it and get it to work
• assumes that home directories are under /Users and that the name of each directory is the owner's short name