Erasing the Hard Drive During Imaging while Netbooted

[#1]

During the Imaging process with Casper, we could not "Erase Macintosh HD", even though we checked the box to do so. The process went extremely fast and no image was copied to the Target drive. Running Disk Utility would not unmount the drive and allow us to repair it. Eventually we had to manually moving the contents of the hard drive (by double clicking on the hard drive, selecting all the folders) to the trash and emptying the trash.

Anyone ever run into a scenario like this? Sounded like a damaged disk directory, but the Target computer would reboot and function normally if we did not image it.

[talkingmoose]

We've had issues with older Mac OSes and newer versions of Casper. For
On 2/3/09 2:44 PM, "Frederick, Scott A" <scott-frederick at uiowa.edu> wrote:
example, we had an older Restore partition that was still at 10.4.4 but we
were trying to run Casper Imaging 6.01. That failed until I discovered this
was an old OS and updated it to 10.4.10.

--

bill

William M. Smith, Technical Analyst
MCS IT
Merrill Communications, LLC
(651) 632-1492

[tlarkin]

Almost sounds like a permissions problem when your network share that
the image is stored on. Are you running any preflight scripts?

[#4]

I had similar issues because the "Diskless" option was not turned on in Server Admin. Unless you specify Diskless, NetBoot will use the HD for shadow files and the like, and you will be unable to mount it because it is in use. If you force unmount it then the netboot image doesn't work properly.

To fix this we just went to Server Admin > NetBoot > Settings > Images and check the Diskless option for the image in question. This solved our issue.

Ryan Harter
UW - Stevens Point
Workstation Developer
715.346.2716
Ryan.Harter at uwsp.edu