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Hi folks,

When upgrading from 10.11 to 10.13 through policies, it fails the first time with the error "Unable to upgrade macOS", but seems to work the second time. but eventually works after rebooting and retrying - sometimes rebooting and retrying several times.

  • I've got two policies, one to push the 10.13 cache, and one to install from cache.
  • I wake the machine in the middle of the night (so it's been restarted since caching), and fire the policy.
  • The policies trigger fine.

Policy shows:

Unable to upgrade macOS

install.log shows:

com.apple.OSInstallerSetup.error Code=219 Target is not convertible to APFS: This volume is not formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

However, the HDD is Journaled HFS+
(It's not SSD, it's a APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E662)

I don't understand why doing it a second (or third/fourth) time seems to make it work, but I'd like to concentrate on the first error above.

Thanks.

I don't know if the following is interesting:
"volume-kind" = msdos; ????
Definitely no FAT partition when checking diskutil.

Feb  2 01:13:27 machinename osinstallersetupd[2151]: mountDiskImageWithPath: /OS X Install Data/InstallOS.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg
Feb  2 01:13:27 machinename  osinstallersetupd[2151]: OSISSoftwareUpdateController: Loaded catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.13-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog (547 products)
Feb  2 01:13:30 machinename  osinstallersetupd[2151]: Mounting disk image complete, results dict = {
            "system-entities" =     (
                        {
                    "content-hint" = EFI;
                    "dev-entry" = "/dev/disk1s1";
                    "potentially-mountable" = 1;
                    "unmapped-content-hint" = "somenumber_masked";
                    "volume-kind" = msdos;
                },
                        {
                    "content-hint" = "Apple_HFS";
                    "dev-entry" = "/dev/disk1s2";
                    "mount-point" = "/Volumes/InstallESD";
                    "potentially-mountable" = 1;
                    "unmapped-content-hint" = "somenumber_masked";
                    "volume-kind" = hfs;
                },
                        {
                    "content-hint" = "GUID_partition_scheme";
                    "dev-entry" = "/dev/disk1";
                    "potentially-mountable" = 0;
                    "unmapped-content-hint" = "GUID_partition_scheme";
                }
            );
        }

Hello CCNapier

Are you positive that you are targeting /dev/disk1s2 & if you are, are you positive that /dev/disk1s2 is the drive you should be targeting? The error that it is throwing smells like for whatever reason you are targeting the msdos drive.

when running the following commands in terminal, what happens?

diskutil list

diskutil mount /dev/disk1s1

Do you know what /dev/disk1s1 is exactly? Did you ever bootcamp a machine?

Hi @Hugonaut!

You know, I have no idea how the targeting is working, I assume from the policy created....
- The policy consists of the installer package only.
- No other settings have been configured (except for default restart and update inventory options).
- How do I know what it targets, and should I be doing it a different way to ensure a certain target? This is a mass upgrade, so target may change?

I've manually updated this machine now (after a another reboot, the whole process worked), so I'm assuming the disks targets are changing on boot to whatever calls in first (I've seen this behaviour in PC). I would have to run a few tests if nobody can confirm that.

Just now, if I do a diskutil list on the same (now updated to 10.13) Mac then is shows the physical disk with Macintosh HD is "disk0s2" (and virtual as simply "disk1"), which appears to be different from the info I pasted above, when it failed.

Interestingly, it also shows external 16GB FAT32 device, so maybe someone left a USB stick in (I was doing this remotely using Remote Desktop). Perhaps that's what was causing the issue (edit, someone IS logged in now, so maybe it was there before, maybe it wasn't), but the problem then remains - how do I target a disk from the simple policy? Time to do some more research. Any insight you may have in the meantime would be appreciated.

BTW, no bootcamp AFAIK. The machine was netbooted and imaged, but I don't know the machines exact history.

Thanks!

EDIT
Looking at the logs on the successful upgrade, it shows the same disk mount results (with msdos), but this time says

Feb  2 11:31:19 computername osinstallersetupd[4227]: Helper tool loaded
Feb  2 11:31:19 computername osinstallersetupd[4227]: Install was requested to a disk that was not evaluated. Blocking on evaluation.
Feb  2 11:31:19 computername osinstallersetupd[4227]: Is solid state disk returned: -69808

And continues to install OK...

Hi @CCNapier I am just curious if you ever got this working? I am having the same issue and I am actually doing bootcamp on my drives (windows partition). I am able to upgrade to High Sierra however it skips the conversion to APFS from HFS. Thanks!

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