createinstallmedia Issues with 10.10.2

[Yebubbleman]

I've noticed that when using createinstallmedia to make a bootable self-contained USB installer of version 10.10.2 of Yosemite, the installer boots to the "OS X Utilities" screen as per normal and will install OS X Yosemite on a target drive with a Recovery HD partition ONCE. After that installation completes, booting from said USB installer doesn't boot to the "OS X Utilities" screen; it instead boots to a variant of the installer where my utilities options change. I have System Profiler where I didn't before. There are a couple of other key differences here and I forgot what they were. Suffice it to say, it's different. This version of the installer also doesn't install the Recovery HD partition.

I've had this experience on two different USB drives and with mutiple copies of the 10.10.2 downloaded installer (from two different AppleIDs). I've never had this happen with createinstallmedia on any version of Mavericks, nor did I have this happen with 10.10.0 or 10.10.1.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? Any help would be appreciated. In the meantime, I very much hope they fix this nonsense with the 10.10.3 installer.

 

[tywebb13]

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[Yebubbleman]

The 10.10.2 full installer does make a 10.10.2 recovery partition. I know it does because I used it to update my 10.10.1 recovery partition to a 10.10.2 recovery partition.

But it may also convert your target volume to core storage which will not allow the recovery partition to show up in the startup manager.

It is still there though.

You can still startup from the recovery partition using Command-R when booting up.

If you prefer to use the startup manager (as I do) to see all bootable partitions including recovery partitions by starting up with the option key, you need to revert the core storage volume first.

If the yosemite installation creates a core storage logical volume you can revert it to get partitions back to normal by running these 2 commands in terminal.

diskutil cs list

and then

diskutil coreStorage revert lvUUID

where lvUUID is the last lvUUID reported by the previous Terminal command.

Then restart for everything to get back to normal after you have run these commands in Terminal.

This will also allow the recovery partition to show up in the startup manager again.

I think you might be misunderstanding me. What I'm saying is that the full installer for 10.10.2, as created by the createinstallmedia terminal application from the 10.10.2 download from the Mac App Store (and unlike the full downloads for 10.10.1, 10.10.0 and every shipped version of the downloads for Mavericks) will work normally the first time and then not the second time and every time thereafter.

By "work normally" I mean that it will boot to "OS X Utilities" and the installation will work in the usual two-phase fashion that it has since the early days of Lion; this entails the creation of the recovery partition and, yes, new to Yosemite, the conversion to CoreStorage for systems that have that one processor feature (the name of which escapes me).

The second time that the USB installer is used, it will boot directly to the second phase of the installer and, thusly, not create the recovery partition. (Whether it still does the CoreStorage conversion, I am not sure; though I don't think that's necessarily relevant.)

What I'm having to do is install 10.10.2 from the drive and then use createinstallmedia all over again to rebuild it as it is wonky (as described above) after the first use. THIS IS NOT HOW IT WORKED FROM 10.9.0 through 10.10.1! THIS IS A PROBLEM. I'm asking if anyone else has experienced this problem and/or has any insight.

 

[Yebubbleman]

I think you might be misunderstanding me. What I'm saying is that the full installer for 10.10.2, as created by the createinstallmedia terminal application from the 10.10.2 download from the Mac App Store (and unlike the full downloads for 10.10.1, 10.10.0 and every shipped version of the downloads for Mavericks) will work normally the first time and then not the second time and every time thereafter.

By "work normally" I mean that it will boot to "OS X Utilities" and the installation will work in the usual two-phase fashion that it has since the early days of Lion; this entails the creation of the recovery partition and, yes, new to Yosemite, the conversion to CoreStorage for systems that have that one processor feature (the name of which escapes me).

The second time that the USB installer is used, it will boot directly to the second phase of the installer and, thusly, not create the recovery partition. (Whether it still does the CoreStorage conversion, I am not sure; though I don't think that's necessarily relevant.)

What I'm having to do is install 10.10.2 from the drive and then use createinstallmedia all over again to rebuild it as it is wonky (as described above) after the first use. THIS IS NOT HOW IT WORKED FROM 10.9.0 through 10.10.1! THIS IS A PROBLEM. I'm asking if anyone else has experienced this problem and/or has any insight.

The problem still happens with the new 10.10.3 installer that popped up on the Mac App Store today. Curiously enough, I've also found that it happens with my copy of the 10.10.1 installer as well. No documentation about createinstallmedia and Yosemite suggests that this will happen, yet it happens for me each and every single time. Please tell me someone knows about this and how to remedy it. I'm going mad here.