OS X El Capitan Upgrade Booting To Recovery HD

kish_jayson
Contributor

We're in the process of rolling out the last of the OS X El Capitan upgrades to our users, but I've run into a handful of machines exhibiting some strange behavior. Specifically, instead of booting to the installer and completing an in-place upgrade, they're booting to the Recovery HD instead.

Here's the policy log for a system that upgraded successfully:

Executing Policy OS X El Capitan
Installing Install OS X El Capitan.InstallESD.dmg...
Preparing for in-place OS upgrade...
Closing package...
Running command kdestroy -a...
Result of command:
Blessing in-place OS upgrade directory...
Mounting install DMGs...
Creating Reboot Script...

Here's the policy log for a system that instead booted to the Recovery HD:

Executing Policy OS X El Capitan
Installing Install OS X El Capitan.InstallESD.dmg...
Preparing for in-place OS upgrade...
Closing package...
Running command kdestroy -a...
Result of command:

I should note that the machines that did not successfully upgrade still have the OS X Install Data folder on the root level of the hard drive. Anyone else run into this, or have any recommendations for how to possibly resolve it?

6 REPLIES 6

thoule
Valued Contributor II

I had this happen on several of my machines. I had the user decrypt the HD, then run the in-place and it went well. I'm not sure if it was the encryption or just retrying it, but 90% of the time, it worked after that.

kish_jayson
Contributor

@thoule I thought that too, but it's happening to both system with and without FileVault enabled.

kish_jayson
Contributor

UPDATE So I can resolve the issue by deleting the existing /OS X Install Data/ directory first, then re-running the policy. However I'd like to try and determine the root cause of why the directory isn't being blessed in the first place.

typingpool
New Contributor

We are having a similar issue (late to update to 10.11). Do either of you have EFI locked? Curious.

kish_jayson
Contributor

@typingpool Why yes, we do indeed have an EFI password set on these machines.

JeffreySerrell
New Contributor

Did anyone ever solve this issue with the EFI Password being set during the in-place upgrade?