Package could not be mounted - No mountable file system

[boberito]

I'm pushing out the installer for High Sierra with a policy. It's in a DMG to later be executed with startosinstall from Self Service.

Anyway I'm getting this error on a handful of machines and re-occuring over and over on some of the machines it's pushed to.

Downloading https://MYJAMFSERVER/Packages/Install%20macOS%20High%20Sierra.dmg... Verifying DMG... Verifying package integrity... Installing Install macOS High Sierra.dmg... Error: The package "Install macOS High Sierra.dmg" could not be mounted (no mountable file systems).

A lot of machines received it no problem, but a handful haven't with this error reoccurring. I thought maybe the connection was getting interrupted but it doesn't seem like that, if I SSH into a machine and execute the policy from the terminal I'll still see the error and never get booted from the SSH session. I don't believe I've ever seen this with other policies and packages before.

[bwiessner]

@boberito

From what I have seen and tested this happens when you create packages on a APFS system like a HighSierra machine - and then deploy them to a computer that is not APFS or highSierra.

[ocla__09]

I'll second that, was driving me crazy until I though to recreate the package in question on a non APFS/High Sierra machine.

The problem immediately went away.

[boberito · Accepted solution]

You might be onto something. It looks like it's failing on machines that are 10.12.3 or lower. It's cached perfectly on 10.12.4 and up machines. Instead of re-pushing the package I think I'll just force these machines to update.

[boberito]

Confirmed it. I updated a machine to 10.12.6 and it worked perfectly. So ya, something in 10.12.4 makes it work.

[chris_kemp]

10.12.4 was when they introduced APFS capabilities.