a member mentioned that there's someone here that has spent a lot of time developing their triage drives and I was wondering if anyone could point me in their direction. I have spent an ungodly amount of time making different multi-partition triage drives and would love to share best practices...
Odds are good that was referring to me. I've maintained a multi-partition service drive for about a decade now. I've got it partitioned into 12 slices, containing bootable install disks that have ranged all the way from 9.2.1 all the way up to 10.9. The oldest install OS on my current drive is 10.5.8 now. (older versions are removed as newer ones are added) I also maintained similar installed OS "service" partitions, where versions of the OS from 10.5 through 10.9 were available to start computers on to run repair or maintenance software, allowing the firewire drive to start up a very wide variety of computers for servicing. Partition sizes were picked for "bare minimum with only a small amount of breathing room", leaving the last partition "service data" to round out the space and contain many disk images (including OS installers, software installers, packages such as iLife and Office, etc) as well as the common service apps that didn't mind not being on the boot volume, and also used for data transfer between computers.
The master drive maintained somewhere around two dozen clone service drives that were used in a variety of roles, mainly for other less experienced techs. These drives contained a large number of scripts to perform useful and sometimes technically-complex processes, that could be used by other techs with much less experience or skill, particularly with command line work. ("force-multiplier") The service drives themselves were kept in sync with the master drive using a sophisticated script that simultaneously updated all partitions on a given drive, and tracked the status of all registered clones.
As of last June, I am no longer working as a repair tech at a service center, and my new job as a system admin rarely requires use of this drive, so it hasn't been maintained recently. I hear that no one at my old employer has chosen to take up the torch, and the collection of (formerly extremely useful) drives have fallen into disrepair and are gradually dropping out of use.
I wouldn't mind sharing my experiences with you. You might find my master syncing script and partitioning script useful. Running them requires only rudimentary understanding, but the periodic maintenance and adjustments for new OSs and changes to the partition schemes will require you to commit to a deeper understanding of how they work. (moderately advanced bash scripting would be necessary)
fyi, my drives aren't based on any existing 'service drive' designs such as those used by micromat, everything I have made has been built from scratch, and the installed-os service partitions are NOT trimmed down installers, they are complete installations that behave just like any normal OS X install. I typically auto-login these partitions as root for simplicity, since security is not applicable and the constant prompts for passwords to do 95% of the work they were made for is bothersome. There's very little special about the actual booted partitions, the magic is mainly in the syncing script and all the service scripts at the disposal of the tech that's using the drive. (the resources on the data partition are also highly organized)
