Out of curiosity, is there a reason to use erase-install for the upgrade instead of using the built in route from System Settings?  It no longer requires admin (as of 12.3), and it's significantly faster than downloading the full Install macOS package.

erase-install is a great tool for wiping an Intel mac, but as of 12.3 I wouldn't use it for upgrading an end user machine.

You mentioned they tried to manually upgrade and it failed which rules out any of the scripting causing issues. MacOS Updates can be a pain to troubleshoot, 95% of the time the issues are network related, but it is possible to get bad source files. MacOS records macOS updates logs in /var/log/install.log, this is where I would start for anything involving OS updates and upgrades.

I suggest moving away from erase my Mac, and using MDM/DDM commands as Apple is pushing for that method to manage updates. With Apple you really do it their way or you don't do it at all. Without a strong background in scripting, erase my Mac may be just too much to use.

I'd agree that DDM based update commands are for the best; that being said I'd also advocate for the fact, that they really only work with any reliability on the latest OSes and you gotta get there somehow as they say. That said I recently used the following command to upgrade 100+ machines to Sonoma without any user interaction whatsoever.

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grahampugh/erase-install/release/erase-install.sh | zsh /dev/stdin --os=14 --reinstall --check-power --no-timeout --very-insecure-mode --credentials <base64 encoded credentials here>

Goes without saying, all kinds of bad form here, piping to zsh, embedded base 64 creds, that said I trust the script as does the community, all said it did work to easily bring the fleet to Sonoma where DDM is much more predictable.

Directions are here:

https://github.com/grahampugh/erase-install/wiki/5.-Erasing-macOS

Base 64 encode script is here:

printf "%s:%s" "<USERNAME>" "<PASSWORD>" | iconv -t ISO-8859-1 | base64 -i -

After you get to v14, rely on DDM

Hope that helps.

M

The erase-install tool was experimented with and used by another person in our org for major OS upgrades with some good success and we were looking for ways to upgrade the OS overnight for always-on Macs.  No user interaction.

We've used the built-in OS upgrade and it works (I use it with a standard user account) but the request of us was to do the upgrades without bugging the users.  Sounds like the built-in route is the better way, I'll search to see if that is automateable.

Based on your response and the one below, it sounds like moving to DDM is the recommended path, time for some searching and learning.

I might not be able to get away with sending encoded credentials in the DDM command but I will explore this option.  Thanks for the links!