Yesterday, I thought I’d came across a potential solution to a problem I’d been having with restoring disk images to target drives using Disk Utility. I keep getting error 22, “invalid argument,” when restoring images over HTTP, using Disk Utility on the original Tiger version of the Mac OS X Install DVD.
While there could be some form of image file corruption, restoring the same images locally — over FireWire target disk mode, for example — appears to succeed reliably and repeatedly. (See also this Shirt Pocket Software thread, where the core error was also not resolved.)
Let’s say that you have your images stored on a Web server — preferably one with some access controls, because you don’t want your system images open to just anyone. That should let you use Apple Software Restore’s HTTP-based image restore feature. You have already prepped the images for ASR, creating them appropriately (possibly through the use of shadow files) and applying the volume-level checksum that is required for block-level restores.
However, let’s assume that your naming convention for system images includes more than one period. After all, you’re creating images for Mac OS X versions like 10.3.9 and 10.4.8 … it’s natural to want to use those version numbers somewhere in your system image names. There’s no sense in changing those periods to some other character, right?
Well, I surmised there might have been a reason to change or remove those periods. I expected that removing — or encoding with %2e (as noted in this URL encoding reference) — the periods from a test image’s name would have a beneficial effect, to let me restore it successfully via HTTP. However, it was still a no-go with the encoded characters, so I’m now back where I started. The image restoration works until near the end of the process, and I get error 22 again. Grr.
I’m wondering out loud now whether there’s a problem with automount, since I’ve seen some search results that seem to mention error 22 in conjunction with it. I have no clue why it would fail only for HTTP-based ASR restores using a Tiger install DVD, though.
It seems I can recall the restore-via-HTTP feature working at some point in the past, but it certainly hasn’t done so to my recollection under Tiger.