Mavericks upgrade only boots to recovery mode

[charliwest]

Anyone had this where you cache the mavericks upgrade, then have a policy to install the upgrade on log out, the machine reboots and will only go into recovery mode? We have had this with two machines so far, one iMac one MacBookAir, if I select the boot drive as the normal drive it still goes into recovery mode and I can't seem to get out of it. Now I am stuck with either a reinstall and recover from time machine (which of course is out of date as the users didn't do it ;) ) or clone hard drive, reinstall and manually put stuff back.

Any ideas?

[Eric_linneweber]

I have seen this a handful of times. When we had seen this I was able to choose the original hard drive as the start up drive and reboot into the OS. No files were lost. Then rerun the two policies and everything ran fine. I was never able to replicate the issue on the bench. My best guess is that something happened when it performs the checks. When I run it on the bench I had the machine hardwired into the network. The clients that had the issue were all running wirelessly at the time..

[denmoff]

I saw this happen one time. It was on a Macbook Pro running 10.6.8 and i think it was on wifi at the time. It was a self service policy that installs the cached installer. I was able to boot back into the 10.6.8 without any issue. I haven't tried it again since the last failure.

[grahamfw]

We're seeing the same thing in our attempts to rollout a self-service Mavericks upgrade. In most instances, you cannot boot to the normal boot device and it ends up having to be a machine rebuild. I'd really like to way to get this to go away. We're on 9.24.

[charliwest]

I think I noticed something with this if people are still having an issue. I had it set to install on logout and reboot, but then also install any cached items on log out. Two thing I found (not sure which or if both are the problem) if it installed some update on logout as well as the mavericks update it went to recovery mode, also the username and password box would pop up with enough time for the user to log in if they were quick and this would then cause the recovery mode as well I think. By tell the user to leave it for 5 mins after the first log in screen we mostly got by with no more of these. We also had to turn off the policy to install cached packages on log out.
Unfortunately I can't test anymore as we got through all our users and we're all on mavericks now.

[tomt]

I've run into this a few times. The solution has been to re-index the configuration.