Lion system won't boot after imaging but Recovery HD will

[talkingmoose]

I prefer to use Casper Admin's feature to add a Mac OS X installer .dmg and image my workstations from that as opposed to using InstaDMG or Composer.

I've opened the Lion 10.7.2 installer and extracted the InstallESD.dmg file. This went directly into Casper Admin 8.4 (although I renamed it) and identified it as a Mac OS X installer.

Casper Imaging 8.4 runs the installer just fine on my NetBooted test machine and I see it installing. However, when the machine reboots it goes directly to the Recovery HD partition (installed at the same time) and boots from that. It won't recognize the system on Macintosh HD although all necessary files appear to be present.

At first I thought this may be a problem with blessing the system on the Macintosh HD but that hasn't worked. I've verified the Recovery HD is not present before installing using the "diskutil list" command.

So, part of the install is working (Recovery HD) but part isn't (Mac OS X 10.7.2 on Macintosh HD). Has anyone else gotten this type of setup to work? Am I missing a step?

[sirkyle]

We experienced the same issue. Do you have a separate partition for Users?

[talkingmoose]

No separate partition for Users. I do have my configuration set to create a "Restore" partition and it too has the same problem as not being recognized as bootable.

[golbiga]

Are you compiling the InstallESD in Casper Admin? This is how I've been creating my Lion image and I've never had the issue where it boots into the recovery partition.

1. Create a config and make sure that management is shut off.
2. That config should consist of the OS Installer, Updates, Printers, Java (anything you want in your Base OS).
3. Compile the config - after it's finished you should have a DMG in Compiled Configurations on your CasperShare.
4. From the finder goto Compiled Configurations and Copy the DMG to your desktop.
5. Now copy that DMG from your desktop to Casper Admin. You now have a BaseOS that has never been booted up with the Recovery Partition and you can apply that to any new Configuration.

Allen

[talkingmoose]

No, I'm not compiling. I'm expecting it to work as it did with 10.5 and 10.6 where Casper Imaging performs an install each time from the installer .dmg.

[golbiga]

I've never tried installing Lion or 10.6 that way. I'll test it out on Monday and see if I see the same thing. Is there anything in the /var/log/install.log that you can see that might help? What other packages are you installing with the istallesd?

[jhbush]

The compile method without a admin account and then copying back to the JSS via CA works well. It's very fast on imaging. Unfortunately I can't use it as I found that for some reason our Juniper VPN will not work correctly. I may try again after 10.7.3. Also make sure you remove the machine if you reimage the machine. I use the two step method now if I need to reimage. Clean net install and then boot to CI on the second reboot. If it's a new machine that shipped with Lion then I just use boot to CI net boot and lay down our software and settings.

[jhbush]

The compile method without a admin account and then copying back to the JSS via CA works well. It's very fast on imaging. Unfortunately I can't use it as I found that for some reason our Juniper VPN will not work correctly. I may try again after 10.7.3. Also make sure you remove the machine if you reimage the machine. I use the two step method now if I need to reimage. Clean net install and then boot to CI on the second reboot. If it's a new machine that shipped with Lion then I just use boot to CI net boot and lay down our software and settings.

[ImAMacGuy]

I just tried that, compile w/o any extra settings - it completes, but when I try to use it as an image it boots to the recovery as well. I haven't had it work since 8.2x. 8.31 and 8.4 both exhibit the same behavior on the compile for me.

[talkingmoose]

@golbiga I'll need to check for the logs. This is as vanilla an install as it gets. No extra packages. No scripts.

[cam · Accepted solution]

We've seen the same thing here (all this was with 10.7.2). When removing Casper Imaging from the mix and using 'installer' from the CLI within a NetBoot set, the OSInstall.mpkg from inside the InstallESD.dmg won't deploy a bootable primary partition. (The Recovery HD will be bootable though). We did see the OSInstall.mpkg package successfully installed via the CLI (with both bootable partitions) when booted from an external drive, internal partition, or NetInstall set.

So it just seemed to be an incompatibility when running the Lion install package specifically from NetBoot. We haven't seen any problems with methods that block-copy the OS from NetBoot though, so compiling in Casper Admin or building a Lion dmg with Composer is what we've been doing.

[talkingmoose]

Thanks for confirming, Cam, and everyone else who's seen this issue!

For now I'm using InstaDMG to create my base OS install. It's not as elegant a solution as dropping the InstallESD.dmg file into Casper Admin but sounds like Apple is the one who has to make this work.

[jarednichols]

Moose I also prefer to drop in the OS install package. We prefer to preserve any vendor-provided install logic and dropping the OS package in does this. I've found that if I do not compile my configuration, I do not get a bootable system after imaging.

While it's a pain during testing your deployments, it saves boat loads of time when your deployments are good to go.

[golbiga]

The only downside to InstaDMG is that it won't create the recovery hd, you will have to do this during firstboot with a policy.

[bentoms]

I found the same issue installing Lion from a NetBoot image (it'll be in the archive somewhere).

Anywho, I've had issues with InstaDMG & as such I compile my Lion base OS in Casper Admin (with Java & printer drivers only).

It creates a clean never booted DMG & captures the recovery partition.

[Kumarasinghe]

Compiling on Casper Admin with java application included fixed the issue that boots in to Recovery HD.

[Matt]

Love to revive this discussion as I too cannot get InstallESD to work nor dropping the Recovery Partition post install.

[ImAMacGuy]

@Kumarasinghe - I was using that method, but it seems to have stopped working again - I tried with (and without) the current Java that came out a couple weeks ago (around WWDC), and it's back to booting to the recovery partition with Casper Suite 8.52

[ImAMacGuy]

so I looked back through my notes and discovered I didn't tell Casper that it was a Mac installer... however now when I try to compile the image it goes through a chunk of it then complains the password to the server is not correct. I click ok and it continues progressing fora bit then seems to get stuck around 95% and sits there.

[Kumarasinghe]

@jwojda

Mine is working fine with every new release of InstallESD.dmg currently I'm testing 10.7.4 and all good.

Check the Distribution Point permissions etc.
Also you can check the Console logs (install.log etc..) of the machine you run the compile from.

@all
Please vote for this feature request to get official Casper support for InstallESD base images.
Deploying OS X v10.7 (Lion) and future releases using InstallESD.dmg
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/featureRequest.html?id=606