Netboot Startup Disk is Almost Full

[rcurran]

I have a 10.8 netboot image that is used just to boot to the casper tools for imaging.

In the beginning I had an issue where I'd receive the error above, so i referenced this article https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=198 and made the netboot image larger. Problem solved.

Then today I receive a few new macbook pros to image, and the problem is back. The system seems to recognize it has the appropriate space. And I've checked the virtual memory files to ensure there isn't anything hogging disk space.

Any tips are greatly appreciated.

Best

[jhalvorson]

How large did you set the netboot image to be? How much memory is installed in the new MacBook Pro?

[rcurran]

I increased the size of the netboot image initially from 10GB to 30GB. 4GB of memory is installed in the new MacBook Pro's.

What's curious is that all the macbook airs in my deployment are imaging fine.

Maybe something with imaging a 10.8 machine with 10.7?

[mking529 · Accepted solution]

I saw this a week or two ago on one of our NetBoot servers. I gave our 10.8 NetBoot 20 gigs of breathing room just to play it super safe, and despite seeing that free space it started complaining. I deleted the shadow files in /Library/NetBoot/NetBootClients0 and restarted the server and it seemed to clear up.

Ah how I'm missing the painless days of 10.6 NetBoots created with the Casper NetInstall creator...

[rcurran]

Rebooting the mac server seemed to do the trick! Thanks for the tips guys!

[CasperSally]

I know why the shadow files exist in Netbootclients0, but it's stupid there's no option to delete unused files after X days, etc without building a custom script. When you image thousands of macs over a few week period using XServe's with 128GB SSD drives, you have to keep up on deleting those shadow files. Hoping the JAMF distribution/imaging solution is the end of netboot in OSX for us.

[Chris_Hafner]

Just checking, but have you set your netboot images to "diskless"? If you haven't then you will get this error.

[rcurran]

I did! Thanks for the tip though.