Empty Home Folder

[hkim823]

I created a test image using a vanilla Snow Leopard DVD, and some simple pkg files such as the 10.6.2 combo update, iLife 09 from the DVD, and a custom PKG I created for Office 2008. The image creates sucessfully.

I take the file, use CCC to put it onto another computer, restart, go through the first launch apple setup, create a new user. When the computer boots, the home folder is empty. When I try to create a new user and log in as that user, it also creates an empty home folder. User Templates/English.lproj is full of folders and files. Ran a repair disk permission and found some issues but it still doesn’t create new users.

Any clues guys?

[larkost]

This is just a wild guess, but are you creating the home folder as part of the image creation routine? When you log in the system checks to see if your home folder exists (there is a folder at that path) if so it assumes things are the way you want them to be and does nothing (some things will auto-generate such as the Library/Preferences folders). If you created this folder ahead of time (like to put something on the desktop), then this would be the expected behavior.

Oh… and there is no need to use CarbonCopy Cloner for this, DiskUtility will do the job just fine, and is more predictable about how it works. CCC attempts different things and can fallback to less efficient methods. Most of the time this should not really be an issue, but you don’t need it. I would rather have the warnings in those cases.

[hkim823]

I did not pre create any users or use any scripts to pre create any users. It’s just as if the computer is ignoring the User Templates folder all together. Maybe I should try to fix permissions on the created DMG before I image?

I’ll use Disk Utility and try another image and see what goes down.

[hkim823]

Something I just thought about that could be the issue / cause funny problems.

If I ran instadmg off a 10.6 Server box (faster processing, hopefully faster image building), but used 10.6 client DVD to build inside of instadmg, would that cause weird issues to arise?

[larkost]

It shouldn’t, but I never test MacOS X Server, only client (as both host and target).

Have you made sure that there is no folder already on the image (you can open up the .dmg without hurting anything as it will be read-only)?

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