Casper imaging within a VM

If it's telling you that it can't locate any drives, it's probably because it can't locate any drives. Open up Disk Utility within your netboot environment. Do you see the disk? If so, format the disk on the VM. If not, then make look in your virtual machine's storage settings and make sure you're pointing to some sort of virtual storage.

Casper Imaging, like the OS X Installer, operates on the assumption that the storage are already initialized and configured into volumes, so they simply show up as drives in the interface to click on. This makes sense since all Macs are pre-configured from Apple to you.

A Virtual Machine only virtualizes a storage device for you, and are unintialised, without a working partition table or any volumes defined, so it shows no usable drives in the interface. Like @bpavlov mentioned, you'll have to take the extra step to initialize the disk yourself. You can either startup from an OS X Install Media to use Disk Utility, or attach the virtual disk to an OS X Virtual Machine that has Disk Utility.

Thanks for your responses. :)

I have already initialised the virtual drives, formatted them, even installed to them via other NetBoot or recovery medias and they are successful.

The issue only occurs when using Casper Imaging which is unable to see the drives during its initial scan (after entering user credentials and prior to getting to the configuration selection screen).

In the meantime, I'm going to have a go at creating another version of the Imaging image - see if it makes any difference.

Thanks
K

I have managed to create a workaround for this by manually configuring a computer to include the Casper Imaging app then creating a NetBoot .nbi using an older version of System Image Utility (specifically the Yosemite version).

Seems that every time it is done by using the Casper NetInstall Image Creator and a El Cap. base image, it is unable to detect the virtual drives but if you do it manually it will.

I shall test it further at a later date to confirm the issue and open a bug report.

Thanks @bpavlov and @htse for your input either way :)

Many Thanks
K

Have you tried using autocaspernbi?

the yoyo nbi you've created won't boot the latest 2015 model imacs

This might seem simple, but is your Volume named "Macintosh HD"? Casper relies on the name specifically.

Hi @calumhunter,

I had not come across that actually. Just took a quick look at it and looks very useful. Will have a play with it later :)

That is acceptable for now as it will only need to boot my virtual machines and not the physical hardware. I will proceed further at a later date making it more compatible instead of having one for VM and one for the physical machines which is what I am now doing.

@Kprice Aye I had named the volume the standard "Macintosh HD" just to make sure that myself as I had wondered. It still refused until I created my frankenstein of a NetBoot image that did detect it. :P

K