cloning a mac to another mac

[lfh]

Hi,

I work in a school for vulnerable kids and I have found a load of 2009 macbooks and a mac mini while clearing a store cupboard out.

The macs where from when music was taught and had been put away and forgotten about for a few years. The macbooks are full of crap and I want to refresh them because they can apparently be updated to Yoseomite. The mac mini has a sticker on saying master so I thought we could clone the drive to the macbooks.

We havent got any disks and Im not great on macs even though I have 3 ios devices.

What would be the best way to refresh the macbooks? I dont know how to reinstall the software without the disks and then we would lose the licenses we have, although I'm not sure even how to find out what licenses we have?

Can anyone help a confused me?

 

[honestone]

Please understand that I have never used a Mac in a "master/slave" environment, nor in dealing with licenses for multiple machines. So, the advice I give below is from that perspective.

In any event, the first thing that needs to be established is which machine do you want to use as the "base"? That is, which machine's software will be used to start from? From what you said, it "seems" like the Mac Mini will be used for this. You need to confirm that.

Secondly, assuming it is the Mac Mini, you need to tell us the exact model that it is. And, also you need to tell us what OS it is now using.

The best strategy, given that none of the Macbooks have a Firewire 800 port, would be to 1) "clean up" the hard drive on the Mac Mini, 2) assuming you are running at least OS 10.6.8 on the mini, upgrade it to Yosemite (now at 10.10.2, and you can do that for free, although it will be a two step process), 3) make a "clone" bootable backup of the upgraded mini to an external hard drive, 4) attach the hard drive to each of the Macbooks, 5) boot from the cloned system on the external drive, 5) use Disk Utility there to erase, format, and if necessary, partition the internal drive on each of the Macbooks, and 6) do a restore of the mini's system on the external drive to the internal drive on each of the Macbooks.

You can use the "free" version of the excellent software SuperDuper! to make a bootable backup on the external drive. And, SuperDuper! can do the restore.

You'll need to first answer the questions I asked above, and also you'll need an external hard drive with at least a USB 2.0 port. 500 gig in size should be enough. From there, we can help you some more.