Yosemite Installer Corrupted?

[#1]

Three managed machines so far have tried installing Yosemite through the App Store and are giving me the Apple message "This Copy of the Install OS X Yosemite application is damaged, and can't be used to install OS X. Tried deleting it and redownloading but no luck. Any one else running into this? Any other ideas?

[mmayo]

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/45404/mac-downloaded-app-is-damaged-and-cant-be-opened-error-solved/

Are your systems configured to only allow applications from the App Store or identified developers? I found this link online suggesting to allow app installs from anywhere, which is weird since Yosemite is obviously from an identified developer.

This is worth looking at though, as it seems to have solved the issue for other people online.

[#3]

Unfortunately that's not the case, all machines are set to anywhere because of other installers that were causing that grief.

[mmayo]

Is uploading Yosemite to your distribution point via Casper Admin an option? May allow for better network performance pulling Yosemite within your local environment instead of from the App Store.

I've never experienced this issue before so I'm sorry if my suggestions aren't good ones.

[#5]

I'm actually having issues with that as well but that may be because my JSS is at 9.22 so I don't want to correlate the two together. I can upload it fine, and Admin pulls the ESD out but when trying to run it it unfortunately doesn't run.

[mmayo]

That's interesting. We are on 9.31 and we never try to push down the native OS update packages. We always just build custom images for our environment instead of using an out of the box approach.

At the same time, using a custom image may not be what you're looking for because you may not want to overwrite the target drive. In our environment, we have desktop support folks that image lab computers once a year, so we use the custom image approach to overwrite the image from the previous year and we stay an OS X version behind. Labs are currently running Mavericks and next year will run Yosemite.

[mpermann]

I ran into a similar issue, but with the latest version of the Casper software. I had to clear the extended attributes then I could get the application to launch properly. I'm not sure if that would help in your case. It's worth a try I guess. Check out the knowledge base article at https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=59

[#8]

So within my installer log this is what is shown when running the Yosemite installer. The confusing like is "Macintosh HD is not recognized as install media?" I've tried repairing permissions and verifying the disk and all seems fine.

Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Hardware: iMac14,2 @ 3.50 GHz (x 8), 8192 MB RAM
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Running OS Build: Mac OS X 10.9.5 (13F34)
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: TMPDIR=/var/folders/kg/v5c5x2rn0qn8x3dmt3f9cp709zcnhq/T/
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: SHELL=/bin/bash
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: HOME=/Users/dbirsan
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: USER=dbirsan
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: LOGNAME=dbirsan
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/launch-ugSnBw/Listeners
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render=/tmp/launch-CITtCT/Render
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=0x13F65617:0:0
Oct 23 12:47:48 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Env: __CHECKFIX1436934=1
Oct 23 12:47:49 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Using distribution archive from /Applications/Install OS X Yosemite.app/Contents/SharedSupport/OSInstall.mpkg
Oct 23 12:47:52 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Macintosh HD is not recognized as install media?
Oct 23 12:47:52 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Checking Software Update catalog URL http://applesus.production.ctv.ca/index_production.sucatalog
Oct 23 12:47:52 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: Using product <OSSoftwareUpdateCatalogProduct> from product keys (null) at distance 25
Oct 23 12:47:59 ag-ctslab-111.local InstallAssistant[2093]: LSExceptions [0x6180000a7320] unloaded

[maxbehr]

See if you have a folder called something like /OSInstall or /OSInstallData at the root of your drive. If so delete it and try the install again.

[bradtchapman]

I had this problem and figured it out: there was a "BaseSystem.dmg" and some other hidden installation files at the root of the drive. These were leftover from a previous failed attempted upgrade to Yosemite. Deleting those files solved the problem.

[koalatee]

In case anyone has this problem and find's this thread... Symptom that OS installer (El Capitan in my case) is damaged (not a 'verified' issue) and installer log says "Macintosh HD is not recognized as install media?"

I had this issue and deleted /BaseSystem.dmg and /BaseSystem.chunklist (both hidden) from 2 machines having this issue (both machines on 10.9.5, if that makes a difference), one of the machines also had the /OS X Install Data/ as maxbehr mentioned. After those were deleted the installer ran fine.