[Casper] Migration Assistant

[Ernst, Craig S.]

I don't usually deal with migrations here, but a ways back there were some posts regarding creating a separate system partition and a user home partition. If memory serves they were using FSTAB to point user homes within the OS itself to the second partition. This way you could blow away the OS partition whenever you wanted to as long as the new OS installed knew to also look in the second partition for user homes. Their data was never touched. I'm sure there is more to that, but wanted to make sure this concept wasn't lost. Wish I could find the thread...

I also realize this is actually a much more major change that doesn't help your current scenario, but something to keep in mind for the future perhaps.

Craig E

On 6/10/09 9:00 AM, "Steven Diver" <sdiver at d125.org> wrote:

Okay, I have some odd behavior here, wondering if anyone else has seen the same thing. If so, were you able to resolve it?

I have setup a nice, clean Mac OS X v10.5.7 base install image...fully patched and updated, with only and Administrator account. I can create and deploy the DMG to machines with no problem.

Here's where my issue comes in. Over the summer, we have roughly 300 teachers on laptops who bring their machines in to have them reimaged with Casper. However, before we do that reimage, we are nice enough backup and reinstall their data for them. The process as it stands right now, is that they bring their laptop with v10.4.11 installed to us, and using Migration Assistant (over the network - with a network cable between the 2 machines) we migrate it to a second laptop with v10.5.7 on it. This works no problem. Their v10.4.11 laptop is then wiped and imaged with Casper to bring them up to v10.5.7, and install all applications. We then want to run Migration Assistant (again via the network - with a network cable between the 2 machines) again to bring the data from that second laptop to the original laptop, both of which are running versions of v10.5.7 that have been installed via Casper. This migration fails, as Migration Assistant only recognizes the the Administator account, despite the fact that the user account and data exists that second laptop. No other accounts are recognized, thus no data can be migrated.

As a test I have installed and updated Mac OS X v10.5.7 on two machines from the install DVD, created Administator accounts on both boxes, and setup a Test account on one fo the machines to migrate, and in that case, Migration Assistant works just fine. It recognizes the Test account and migrates data over without issue.

To be safe, I recreated the v10.5.7 DMG to make sure there were no issues with my base OS, that didn't resolve my issue. So at this point, I am wondering if there is something with Composer creating the OS Package, or something in the deployment of the OS via Casper Imaging. It seems to be something that is happening between those two points.

Anyone seen anything like this? Or more importantly, been able to resolve it?

Thanks,
Steve

--
Steven Diver, Network Manager
Adlai E. Stevenson High School / www.d125.org <http://www.d125.org>
Email: sdiver at d125.org / Phone: 847.415.4304

"Be not simply good, be good for something."
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.jamfsoftware.com/pipermail/casper/attachments/20090610/5f1478e0/attachment.html