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Anyone know anything about resetting these 3 OS's on boot, I prefer some kind of software.

I have 3 machines that i use for testing software, i want those machince to be as clean as possible after each boot.

  • Mac OS X 10.6.8
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
  • Windows 7

Thanks.

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3 Answers 3

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For Windows and Linux variants the easiest way is to host them in a virtual machine. If you use VMWare then you can set the disk to be non-persistent, so that when you reboot it goes back to the last snapshot. You can do this in the free VMWare player.

For the Mac I think you would need to set up an OSX server which can then provide Netboot images to client machines that reset to a known state every time.

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Virtualisation is probably the way to go with this. Use something like VirtualBox and can take a snapshot of the operating system in a fresh state.

Then, it is trivial to reset any of the OS in question to a blank state. It will also mean you won't need 3 machines anymore, you could do it with 1.

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  • that could be a solution. But it would be awesome if some software could just delete/revert all files since login
    – Rasmus Styrk
    Aug 16, 2012 at 12:39
  • Not sure about Linux, but Windows and Mac both have some restore features don't they? i.e. Time machine in Mac?
    – Adam King
    Aug 16, 2012 at 12:40
  • I have 3 machines because of different hardware (cpu speed/ram avail).
    – Rasmus Styrk
    Aug 16, 2012 at 12:40
  • With VirtualBox you can specify the cpu and ram availability to each VM.
    – Adam King
    Aug 16, 2012 at 12:41
  • You know anything about using diskimages and then reinstall the image on boot?
    – Rasmus Styrk
    Aug 16, 2012 at 12:45
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One option for OS X is Faronics Deep Freeze, which resets the computer back to standard at each reboot. It's not going to be as convenient or flexible as a virtual machine, but since the license of OS X v10.6 (non-server version) doesn't allow virtualization...

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