HD Mounting Issue in newly created OSX El Capitan Netboot Image

[morriscatholic]

Hello all,

Apologies for my greenhorn nature in advance. I'm just finalizing an imaging structure for some new MacBook Airs here at our school. I've made a working image, tested it on older hardware, and it's working flawlessly.

However, I ran into trouble creating the Netboot image for the new Mac Airs. I have a working, bootable El Capitan NetBoot image, however, after boot, the local HD is not mounting. When I try to select this location and image to it, the Casper Imaging app crashes. I've tried re-formatting and it still doesn't mount.

I've been looking around, and haven't seen anything here or elsewhere that is pointing me to an answer. I'm hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction.

Here's what I did to create the NetBoot:

1.) Grabbed the ElCapitan OS Installer from the app store.
2.) Used AutoDMG to create the DMG.
3.) Passed the DMG to AutoCasperNBI and used mostly standard settings. (I changed to serve over HTTP, chose to create a Removable Disk version for USB, and chose to shrink the newly created image.)
4.) Boots on Newer MacBook Air Hardware.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated, I know it's probably something simple, but I can't seem to find it!

Thanks,
-Rich

[mpermann]

@morriscatholic do you have "Make this image available for diskless booting" option checked for the NBI on your NetBoot server? I'm making an assumption that you are using Mac OS X Server as your NetBoot server when asking my question.

Edit: we personally use NFS for our NBIs and haven't ran into the problem.

[morriscatholic]

I do have it checked, and yes, I'm using Mac OSX Server. Thanks for the double check though! I'm using HTTP because I was getting kernel panics when I used NFS on the same NBI. It's was also checked in the settings on AutoCasperNBI.

Any idea on what to look into next?

Thanks,
-Rich

[mpermann]

@morriscatholic What version of the JSS and Casper Imaging are you using? You want to make sure the versions match generally speaking. Have you tried building the NBI without checking the Reduce Image Size and Create a Restorable DMG options in AutoCasperNBI? I don't normally have those options enabled. I do have the Install Modified rc.netboot file option enabled though.

[morriscatholic]

Thanks again for the response!

I'm using JSS and Casper 9.71. Made sure they matched before I made the image. I rebuilt the NBI using your suggestion, and still no joy. :0(

I called up support, and they're recommending upgrading the JSS and Casper Suite. I'm giving that a whirl tomorrow to see if this will help any, but I'm not sure this is where I need to go with this.

I'll let you all know what happens.

Thanks,
-Rich

[mpermann]

@morriscatholic yeah, JSS 9.71 doesn't support El Capitan. According to the release notes, JSS 9.8 had limited Mac OS 10.11 support and 9.81+ had full support for 10.11. Hopefully your problem will go away once you upgrade. Good luck!