Mac imaging issues - newbie.

[MargaretD1]

I'm very new to SCCM Mac Management and have run into a strange issue. Captured a mojave image a couple of weeks back, no problem. Was able to image a brand new, out of the box iMac with it, had no issues (using netboot). Wonderful! Then tried an older iMac - the task sequence failed every time and I was not able to get the logs. Trying to copy them to an external drive in Terminal gave me "resource is busy" error.
Tried another brand new, out of the box iMac. Should have been very same model as the first that worked, but I get the same error as with the first one that failed. And same issue with the logs. I've captured photos of the logs and will upload them here, but basically this is what they say:

I get the error "cannot prepare to restore" at the very end. Everything before these lines looks ok to me. I think maybe the issue is with the 23 disks that I end up with. Not sure how that is happening or why. The second image will show you the actual error message. Hope someone can shed some light on this?

 

[andrewb11]

Are you going from High Sierra to Mojave? What doe the task sequence look like? Are you formatting the drive during the task sequence? With Mojave, I don't believe you'll want to format/partition the drive. The Mojave installation itself takes care of that since it performs the apfs conversion. Not sure if this is the issue, but we ran into some similar things

 

[MargaretD1]

Are you going from High Sierra to Mojave? What doe the task sequence look like? Are you formatting the drive during the task sequence? With Mojave, I don't believe you'll want to format/partition the drive. The Mojave installation itself takes care of that since it performs the apfs conversion. Not sure if this is the issue, but we ran into some similar things

Hi Andrew,

thanks for your reply. Yes, I believe we are going from HS to Mojave (I'm sure about the Mojave part, not 100% sure about HS) and the task sequence is super simple:
1. Apply image to next available formatted partition
2. set hostname.

That's all. It was just a test so I kept it simple.

 

[PVCIT]

If you are imaging (and not internet recoverying/mdm like apple wants you to) you should just image a 10.12.6 (long as machine will boot 10.12) and then run the setup assistant at the end to upgrade you to mojave. This will give you the firmware you need to boot most older macs. Newer ones usually have enough firmware on them but olders ones sometimes will take it and crash reports or not take it. Remember with mojave the filesystem is now apfs for ssd and hd while in high sierra it was just for ssd. Older machines sometimes do not know how to deal with that.
When I started I tried a mojave image and then also ran setup assisstant to reupgrade it to mojave to get firmware but some models were confused as they were on mojave already and wanted firmware from setup assistant that would not give it because it was already on mojave.

 

[SergeyD1]

Tell me how to deal with this problem, who has a solution?

 

[PVCIT]

Do not image with a mojave image. You will have random luck depending on the model because of the firmware. I had some machines take it it no problem and because I run mojave install afterwards as well for the firmware they were fine but one would fail on the mojave install because the mojave image was already on and it was confused. This is why you should just put a 10.12.6 image on, then in that same task sequence have it run the mojave installer UNLESS your machine requires mojave and will not work with sierra.
1. Delete APFS Container
# Allows going from macOS 10.13+ back to 10.12
diskutil apfs deleteContainer /dev/disk0s2
2. Format and Partition Disk
3. Apply OS X Image (Sierra).
4. Copy Apple Installer to /Applications
5. Execute Apple Installer for Mojave
sudo "/Applications/Install macOS Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall" --agreetolicense --nointeraction --rebootdelay 1

You then will have an image from sierra put on, it will upgrade to mojave and you will have all the firmware you need for machine and be converted to APFS.

 

[JasonK15]

Do not image with a mojave image. You will have random luck depending on the model because of the firmware. I had some machines take it it no problem and because I run mojave install afterwards as well for the firmware they were fine but one would fail on the mojave install because the mojave image was already on and it was confused. This is why you should just put a 10.12.6 image on, then in that same task sequence have it run the mojave installer UNLESS your machine requires mojave and will not work with sierra.
1. Delete APFS Container
# Allows going from macOS 10.13+ back to 10.12
diskutil apfs deleteContainer /dev/disk0s2
2. Format and Partition Disk
3. Apply OS X Image (Sierra).
4. Copy Apple Installer to /Applications
5. Execute Apple Installer for Mojave
sudo "/Applications/Install macOS Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall" --agreetolicense --nointeraction --rebootdelay 1

You then will have an image from sierra put on, it will upgrade to mojave and you will have all the firmware you need for machine and be converted to APFS.

So is this something you can place into the initial imaging task sequence or something that has to happen after it boots? I know it's been almost a year since you posted then but can you give the details on how you configured this?

 

[BruceH11]

To be honest, I don't yet understand where to start. I think you should carefully read and do everything.