Unattended Setup on a Physical Mac

[mindrunner]

This is a follow-up on #70

I am using osx-vm-templates to bootstrap an image for my packer script. I would like to use the same (or similar) dmg to install physical macs. AutoDMG is not really an alternative, because it does not create bootable images. I am not aiming for having a complicated netboot setup. I just need to reinstall a mac without the need to have physical access.

What is the difference between booting the image in a VM or on a physical mac? Would it boot on a mac when it was on a DVD instead of USB? (VMware/Virtualbox are emulating disk drives, instead of booting from USB).

I know, this project is not about booting natively, but it would be nice to see it happen, and this project is way closer to what I want to achieve than everything else I have seen so far.

[timsutton]

Sorry for the delay responding here - but AutoDMG definitely does create bootable images.. that's what it was created for.

This project really was designed for building VMs, however. To reinstall a Mac without the need for physical access, I'm not sure how one can easily do that without a Netboot environment.

[mindrunner]

According to AutoDMG readme:

The award winning AutoDMG takes a macOS installer (10.9 or newer) and builds a system image ?> suitable for deployment with Imagr, DeployStudio, LANrev, Jamf Pro, and other asr-based imaging > tools.

This, for me, does not look like a bootable Image. It is rather an image to be used with a third party application.

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Still, I have open questions. I checked the source code of this project and it seems that there is not really magic happening. A stock apple dmg easily boots from USB-disk, as well as from emulated DVDROM in vmware/virtualbox. However, the osx-vm-templates-dmg seems to get stuck when booted from USB. Shouldn't there an easy explanation for this?