Failed hard drives due to re-imaging

[tatiang]

Is anyone else having problems with hard drives not being recognized after a
failed imaging process?
I start to re-image a machine that has been netbooted with Casper Imaging,
it freezes during the imaging process, and I have to force-quit/manually
power down the machine. When I start it up again, from a netboot server or
OS X Install DVD, it either doesn't recognize the hard drive, or else I can
reformat it but it won't netboot.

Any ideas about this?

I'm starting to worry that I'll be buying replacement hard drives left and
right.

Tatian

---

Tatian Greenleaf
Associate Director of Technology
Saint Mark's School
(415) 472-8000 x1014

[dustydorey]

Do you mean after the failed image it will not netboot at all, or does
it netboot and attempt to load Casper Imaging and encounter an error due
to a "missing" or "non-existing" drive?

I had an instance where I was imaging intels then realized I needed to
change something major in the Config. So I killed the image process and
re-netbooted. BAD IDEA. Since we are using a net-install set via
casper and I didn't have any other boot media with me like install DVD's
I had to re-netboot to the install set. Kill Casper Imaging and then
Re-format and name the drives via Terminal from the netintstall set.

It sounds like you are experiencing an similar issue but I may just be
missunderstanding your issue too.

For me it was that at the point that my image "failed", because I
foolishly killed it, the hard drive was either not finished being
formatted correctly or did not have the name "Macintosh HD" which at
least our Netinstall set/Casper Imaging set up looks for by default.
So it would re-netboot and the autorun data would just fail because it
couldn't find a correctly named HD.

-Dusty-

That may have nothing to do with your issue, but that's my experience
with that. In my case there wasn't anything wrong with the HD itself,
it just needed to be formatted and named correctly. Imaging a drive
just uses it. Meaning it's just spinning the disc and writing data to
it. It would seem to me that if in the process of imaging a drive truly
dies i.e. starts the click of death or something, the drive was destined
for near future failure anyway. I don't believe casper writes anything
to the HD's firmware or anything that could cause a true HD failure
outside of a physical one from stress.

[Bukira]

Yeah that's coz if the Casper netinstall creator , use apples NetBoot creator,

I have same prob but it only happens occasionally

But it's known by jamf

Criss

[#4]

Yep, I had that problem on one machine.

I'm not exactly sure what caused it because it was the very first machine we ever imaged using Casper - so we were still learning - all kinds of things could have gone wrong.

For us it was the issue of the HD not having a recognizable name (we have Macintosh HD and a Restore partition). But no matter how many times we re-imaged it, we still had very weird issues with it.

So, in the end I just zeroed out the drive, re-imaged from scratch, and it's been fine ever since.

-Baker

Baker Franke
Computer Science Dept.
University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
773.702.5419

[tatiang]

Actually, the MacBook will no longer netboot. It gets to the flashing globe
sign and then displays a flashing question mark. It never gets to the
LaunchPad. Meanwhile, I am imaging other MacBooks just fine from the same
image. This has happened to me three times with different MacBooks, all of
which were working fine up until I had to interrupt the imaging process.
Reformatting the hard drive (when Disk Utility can actually detect it)
doesn't seem to help with the NetBoot process. I've also had this happen
where I *could* NetBoot but Casper Imaging couldn't recognize the drive.

Tatian

---

Tatian Greenleaf
Associate Director of Technology
Saint Mark's School
(415) 472-8000 x1014

[John_Wetter]

The main issues with this are when it errors during the block copy. So, if you have compiled configurations, this now means an error any time during the imaging process. The only way I know to fix this is to re-partition the computer. As far as the netboot, you might want to do an option + N to get it to reset the default netboot server in the EFI. I’ve seen that before also.

John

--
John Wetter
Technology Support Administrator
Educational Technology, Media & Information Services
Hopkins Public Schools
952-988-5373

[Bukira]

You need to boot from a cd and reformat the drive.

Launchpad won't re format the drive if the imaging process crashed.

[tatiang]

I was able to reformat the drive and install OS X using the Erase & Install
option from the OS X Install DVD, but it still wouldn't netboot. I then
checked the Ethernet connection and the computer is reporting that the
(otherwise working) ethernet cable is not plugged in. So, a new issue to
troubleshoot!
Thanks for everyone's suggestions. I'll let you know what eventually fixes
this.

Tatian

---

Tatian Greenleaf
Associate Director of Technology
Saint Mark's School
(415) 472-8000 x1014

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 6:29 AM, Dorey, Dustin <Dustin.Dorey at district196.org > wrote: