InstaDMG with 10.5.7 and 10.5.8

[Patrick Fergus]

thegooch49,

You’re able to build a 10.5.8 image with 10.5 retail? Can you expand a little?

– What version of Mac OS X is doing the actual InstaDMG work?
– Is iChat in the resulting ASR image version 4.0.7 and Mail at version 3.5 (or greater)?
– What build number of 10.5.8 do you reach?

Thanks,

– Patrick

[walt]

I just noticed Apple seems to have posted an updated 10.5.8 Combo Update rather quietly on 9/24. Also it is a different file size than the original combo update DMG I had.

[url]http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/macosx1058comboupdate.html[/url]

[alantrewartha]

i downloaded this new 10.5.8 combo updater and compared it to the original i still have in my build train, and i don’t think i can see any substantial difference in the BOM (identical output from lsbom on the extracted bom files) or scripts.

looking in the flat package editor there is a ‘Distribution’ file in the new one, along with a load of regionalisation .lproj folder ( with License.rtf and SUDescription.html files and so on)

[hotwired34]

I have been working for hours upon hours to try and figure this out with no success. I had a very stable 10.5.6 image that I created with one of the 1.4 versions of InstaDMG. We got a few new MacBooks that needed the version to be up to 10.5.8 to recognize the Airport card and I have not been able to create a good image. I am able to create an image, and it seems to work, however, there are a few bugs in it.
First and most importantly, it seems like the computer is stuck in verbose boot mode. I have tried running the [i]nvram boot-args=””[/i] command and that seems to do nothing. I have recreated the image about 5 different times with different versions of InstaDMG and on different hardware…all with no success in getting the computer to boot right.
Second, I am noticing that the admin user that I created with CreateUser.pkg has only the Library folder in it’s user folder. I am not sure how big of a deal this is due to the users not using local accounts anyway. I am just not sure if this is going to be a problem moving forward.

If anyone could please help, that would be great.

Thanks.

[thegooch49]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: hotwired34[/u][p]
First and most importantly, it seems like the computer is stuck in verbose boot mode. I have tried running the [i]nvram boot-args=””[/i] command and that seems to do nothing. I have recreated the image about 5 different times with different versions of InstaDMG and on different hardware…all with no success in getting the computer to boot right.

Thanks.[/p][/QUOTE]

Hi hotwired, to fix the verbose boot, just go to the startup disk in System Preferences, and select your disk. Reboot, and it will be gone. Some of the newer computers set verbose startup mode when the startup disk set in EFI is not available.

[hotwired34]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: thegooch49[/u][p][QUOTE][u]Quote by: hotwired34[/u][p]
First and most importantly, it seems like the computer is stuck in verbose boot mode. I have tried running the [i]nvram boot-args=””[/i] command and that seems to do nothing. I have recreated the image about 5 different times with different versions of InstaDMG and on different hardware…all with no success in getting the computer to boot right.

Thanks.[/p][/QUOTE]

Hi hotwired, to fix the verbose boot, just go to the startup disk in System Preferences, and select your disk. Reboot, and it will be gone. Some of the newer computers set verbose startup mode when the startup disk set in EFI is not available.[/p][/QUOTE]

Thanks for the reply. While that did fix the issue, I was wondering if it was possible to do that programmatically? Here is my issue, I have literally thousands of computers that I am using this process on and I can’t have it where I have to log in to each machine to select the startup disk. I have tried the bless command with no success. Here are the commands that I have tried:

sudo bless –mount “/Volumes/Macintosh HD” –setboot
sudo bless –folder “/System/Library/CoreServices” –file “/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi” –setboot

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks again for the reply.

[larkost]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: hotwired34[/u][p]
sudo bless –mount “/Volumes/Macintosh HD” –setboot
sudo bless –folder “/System/Library/CoreServices” –file “/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi” –setboot
[/p][/QUOTE]

Why are you trying to use the –folder version of bless? That does not really do what you think it does, and is totally unnecessary with MacOS volumes (only needed if you are playing with EFI binaries, and I am sure you don’t need to do that). You only need the first command, and are messing things up with the second.

[hotwired34]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: larkost[/u][p][QUOTE][u]Quote by: hotwired34[/u][p]
sudo bless –mount “/Volumes/Macintosh HD” –setboot
sudo bless –folder “/System/Library/CoreServices” –file “/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi” –setboot
[/p][/QUOTE]

Why are you trying to use the –folder version of bless? That does not really do what you think it does, and is totally unnecessary with MacOS volumes (only needed if you are playing with EFI binaries, and I am sure you don’t need to do that). You only need the first command, and are messing things up with the second.[/p][/QUOTE]

I was not running the two consecutively. These were just the commands that I had tried to use. I eventually got this figured out. What I did, and I am not sure if this is a best practice, was copy off 2 files, BootX and boot.efi, from a ‘repaired’ box (repair done by going through System Preferences -> Startup Disk method outlined above) and copy them down to an alternate location on an effected computer (/System/Library). Then run the following command:
sudo bless –folder “/System/Library” –file “/System/Library/boot.efi” –setboot

[larkost]

No “repair” is necessary. The image will always be bootable. The only thing you need to fix is to mark the volume as the one chosen to boot. That is it. The reason thing boot into verbose mode is that EFI does not know what volume to boot from, and so it guesses (it is actually quite good at this). On newer computers when EFI guesses it sets the verbose mode, assuming something might have gone wrong. There is nothing more to this.

[hotwired34]

[quote]No “repair” is necessary. The image will always be bootable. The only thing you need to fix is to mark the volume as the one chosen to boot. [/quote]

Larkost, I understand that it is not necessarily broken. You say that the only thing you need to do is mark the volume as the chosen boot…but how do you do that. With the bless command, it does not work. From what I understand, the boot.efi/BootX files are not the right ‘version’ and going through the System Prefs process ‘rewrites’ them to the correct version. I know that opening System Prefs then Startup Disk then selecting the disk and restarting may take only a few minutes…but moving forward, a few minutes times potentially thousands of machines is a long time! If this needs to be done in an automated fashion, how can this be done?

Thanks.

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