Dual boot Casper Fusion Drive Imaging.

[tijones]

Hey Guys,

We currently have deploystudio for deployment however they don't quite support fusion drives. We are also using casper 8.62 for device management and image creation.

My questions is before I go ahead,

Does casper imaging support Fusion Drives
Does casper imaging support the Recovery Partion on Fusion drives
Does casper imaging support dual boot on Fusion drives.

Im in the middle of creating a win-clone but it would be nice to know before I go ahead and waste any unnecessary time.

Cheers
Tim

[brlittle]

@tijones:

What's not working with DeployStudio? We've successfully imaged single-boot Fusion drive iMacs with it. Dual-boot is another matter. It's my understanding of the Fusion setup that it's CoreStorage-based, so Windows will never be able to use it, though you can still boot Windows from a partition on the spindle drive. There's more information here: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57549766-263/taming-apples-new-fusion-drive-technology/

(I should note that I've been told by an Apple SE that a lot of the information in this and other Fusion drive reviews is wrong, but the SE refused to elaborate on that comment, so I suppose we're left to figure it out for ourselves.)

Anyway, I realize this doesn't answer your Casper questions, but I *am* curious to know what's failing and how.

[tijones]

The big one is once i image the Mac with DeployStudio I cant even use Bootcamp Util to create a partiton as it says the disk is not journaled,

Also have you seen where DS puts the OS on the disk it is in the wrong place compared to factory. (which is possibly causing this issue)

Update : Ok Just managed to break Fusion took a while Diskutil will not remove the volume /s other than using the following commands to remove both HDD from the Volume group

diskutil cs removeDisk XXXX
diskutil cs removeDisk XXXX

Now there is no logical Volumes or group, Opened internet recover and then diskutil, Clicked Fix and now its processing creating Logical volumes again hopefully so i can reinstall osx into the correct place. Wont use DeployStudio partitioning on these machines then, lol

[JPDyson]

Just to see what would happen, I imaged a Mini with a Fusion drive the way we would any other Mac (which does involve having Imaging erase the drive, and replace with an OS and Recovery image we've packaged). It was bootable, but it applied the configuration directly to the HDD (not at the LVG/CoreStorage level, and curiously not to the SSD, which I believe is disk0).

My recommendation would be to use the thin imaging approach on these, at least for now. 10.8.3 might change things, or a future version of Casper Suite, but I would take the OS they give you and apply an apps-only configuration.

Edit: Upon further investigation, I wasn't able to reproduce the error I previously saw (namely that the Recovery HD was applied to an individual disk, not the LVG). I believe the time it failed I was attempting to use a Recovery HD package as a "Restore" partition as a test, which definitely doesn't work :)