How to: Imaging Mojave 10.14

@jredge my best guess is that it needs the new firmware in order to mount the new partition. Has to be something different with Mojave, I had already updated all mine.

I’d you take that same machine and update the firmware (run it manually from any boot device) and run the imager again doesn’t it work?

Unfortunately getting the same response. The firmware install shows as successful. Killed the process after it failed and opened disk utility and here is the state of the internal SSD. Prior to this it was MacOS Extended Journaled running 10.12.6.

@jredge did you reboot after installing the firmware package? It has to boot after package to actually install the firmware. The package just sets the install in place. On next boot you will get an extra “loading bar” where it installing the firmware.

@chrisdaggett I did, but ended up with the same issue. For testing sake, I ran a NetInstall of 10.13.5 onto that machine, then ran the imager and it worked just fine. So definitely something to do with the Firmware not being present on the 10.12 and older machines. I'm going to try and rebuild the firmware package and see if something went screwy there.

Thanks again for your help!

@jredge Think I may have just run into the same problem you are having.

The problem is when the image is made on a larger byte drive. IE: All my macbook air 11" are 128gb, however some are JUST a hair lower in total bytes and so the image will not "expand". What I found I had to do was use Carbon Copy Cloner to image one of the smaller drives from the "large" image, then take a NEW image using Disk Utility of the "smaller" drive and use that as my master instead.

@chrisdaggett I am trying to image a lab of identical Late 2015 iMacs running 10.13.6 and I keep getting the couldn't resize container error. Along with the firmware is outdated. I can only get the imager to work if I first install Mojave then run the imager. Any thoughts?

@darryl_martin it sounds like you need to pull a new firmware and install that first (or as part of the imaging process). I hadn’t run into that with 10.13.6 to Mojave but obviously I haven’t imaged every type of machine :). Perhaps yours had a firmware update between 10.13.6 and Mojave that it needs. Perhaps they are fusion drives? (Apple allowed APFS on fusion with Mojave maybe that requires new firmware)

Instructions can be found on my previous 10.13 imaging thread:

https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/27001/high-sierra-imaging-how-to

The only other time I ran into imaging issues were due to fluctuation in drive sizes. Even if 2 drives were “256gb” one would have a smaller byte count and fail to image. However Unless are somehow gaining extra bytes installing Mojave, this wouldn’t make sense here. The options to fix this are either: image the smaller drove using your image but with SuperDuper! Then make a new image of that with diskutility. (iE making a new image of the smaller byte drive), or resize the APFS container before you make the image. Even if you make the container 40gb it will resize to the full drive when you image.

Chris, thanks for all the works you put into this Mojave imager18. It is amazing. I was curious about where is the automated script locates at. I would like to make some changes to the Volume name in the script to execute correctly.

Thanks in advance.

I am unable to upgrade my mac from Sierra to Mojave. I have another MB running Mojave, i did a target mode to Mojave MB from Sierra, but my Sierra is unable to create image. Any tips?