About Core Storage & Deep Freeze Mac

Overview

Recently Apple has been shipping computers with Core Storage enabled on them, this results in an error being shown when the users attempt to install Deep Freeze Mac on the workstation. Core Storage is shipping enabled by default on many new Macs, specifically iMacs with Fusion Drives and hard disks 3tb and larger.

What is Core Storage?

Core Storage is a volume manager added to OSX in version 10.7 (Lion) and later. This volume manager provide apple with more flexibility in how they manage storage on systems running OSX, and is the basis of the Fusion Drive technology, and the File Vault full disk encryption software that included as part of the operating system.

Why is this a problem for Deep Freeze?

Most applications will not have a problem with an OSX machine running a volume managed by Core Storage as most applications interact with the operating system at the file system level. At the file system level the underlying volume manager is not a huge concern as the operating system takes care of the task of getting the data requested to the applications. Deep Freeze however works with the disks at a physical level and Core Storage completely changes how disks are visible to applications like Deep Freeze.

To check to see if you have a Core Storage volume enabled on your machine follow the instructions linked below:

https://faronics.kayako.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/398/36/problems-installing-deep-freeze-mac-on-core-storage-volumes

What can be done?

At the current time the only option that we can provide to our customers is to disable Core Storage on any system that you would like to run Deep Freeze on. This does however have some disadvantages;

• File Vault cannot be enabled if Deep Freeze is to be installed.
• Once Core Storage is disabled the ability to use a Fusion Drive will be lost.
• On hard disks 3tb and larger this may cause problems with dual booting OSX and Windows.

If you would like to be informed of updates on this issue please contact Faronics Support via email to support@faronics.com explaining the situation. We will open a ticket on this issue and provide updates as they become available.