Recently I've begun working on a project involving the installation of Windows 8 onto six iMacs with almost identical hardware. The goal of my project is to eventually have Windows 8 Developer Preview dual booting with OS X v.10.6.8 through Bootcamp, and to develop a method of pushing out Windows 8 images so that they are still bootable through Bootcamp. The purpose of this being to have the ability to at any time restore the Windows partition to a predesignated state without effecting the OS X partition and to have an easier method of installing Windows across all six of the iMacs in case a new build or release of Windows 8 becomes available.

So far I have successfully installed Windows 8 onto one of the iMacs using the standard Bootcamp process and have installed all of Bootcamp’s drivers without issue by using Windows 7 compatibility mode. However, I have not been so successful with pushing out this setup to the other iMacs.

So far, I have tried to use Gparted for cloning the Windows partition on the iMac to a portable hard drive and then tried moving it onto a second iMac by using Bootcamp to partition the second iMac’s hard drive and then, again, using Gparted to clone the partition now on the portable hard drive to the second iMac in the place of the partition made by bootcamp. After this, bootcamp was unable to find the window partition so i returned the iMac to it’s original state, and tried the same process again but with Acronis Disk software instead, however, this attempt had the same results.

iMac System Specs:
Windoes 8 DP
Intel Core i5 2500S @ 2.7GHz
8.0 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 1333 MHz Ram (2 x 4GBs)
Apple Inc. Mac-942B5BF58194151B (U2E1) Motherboard
AMD Radeon HD 6770m
WDC WD1001FALS-403AA0
Cirrus Logic CS4206A (AB 09) (Audio)

If anyone has any ideas or opinions, input would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you would like more info on any of the processes a went through I would be happy to flesh out the intricacies.

Thanks,
Joseph.