Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message

[jmason]

@Sebastian-Roth @Tom-Elliott One thing I realized today is that when the deploy fails it reboots and that gives the system a chance to initialize the way the master image expects.

Initially I assumed the key to this working for my setup was in making sure that the smaller drive was the first drive in the master image captured, so that it didn’t attempt to deploy the smaller image onto the larger drive and then fail when attempting to image the larger image onto the smaller drive. I’m not sure that is actually necessary.

So I hooked up 10 of my laptops to the switch today and deployed the group, about half failed the first startup, but on the next reboot all of them initialized the drives as the master image expected.

This might not work well for a system with more than 2 nvme drives being imaged, so I’ll still help test anything you guys come up with and need testing. But I’m fairly satisfied with even the failure and reboot and hoping it will init correctly on the next boot.

[Sebastian Roth]

@jmason Well that is definitely not too bad of an idea. Just let it try often enough till it doesn’t fail anymore. While this will help you not getting under pressure time-wise it’s not an ideal solution. I will let you know when I get something to test ready.

[george1421]

@jmason said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

Ubuntu showed the behavior on the 3rd with lsblk and 5th reboot with dmesg, while reboot 7 was different than all previous, I’ll move on to the other 2 ISOs next.

Since this issue is happening with a commercial versions of linux… I wonder if there is any value in calling Dell tech support? This could be the linux kernel doing this, or it could be the uefi firmware. I think you have enough evidence to say its either the hardware, uefi, or the linux kernel doing it. Your ubuntu test doesn’t use the latest kernel, but FOG does so you have a range of kernels where this problem exists.

[Sebastian Roth]

@jmason Ok, got a bit of time to code and test over the weekend. Here is a first try.

Download the init file from our website manually and put in /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe/ on your FOG server. Make sure the file is owned by the apache webserver user (see user name of the other files in that directory)! Now edit the settings of one of the hosts you are trying to deploy to in the FOG web UI and set Host Init to init_nvme.xz. Schedule a deploy task and now keep an eye on the blue screen output of partclone. It should tell you NTFS for windows partitions and probably XFS or EXT4 for the CentOS Linux partitions. See which one it does first. Note that down and do another two or three rounds till you see it deploying the other OS/disk first.

[jmason]

This post is deleted!

[jmason]

@Sebastian-Roth set it up as described and did a debug deploy. There was a new message I hadn’t seen before:

*Preparing Partition layout
cat: '/images/myImageName/*.size' : No such file or directory

Same message appears after the Attempting to deploy image notice box.

In the Partclone window, the File System partitions for my linux ~500GB drive showed:

/dev/nvme0n1p1 as raw (134.2 MB)
/dev/nvme0n1p2 as FAT16 (209.7 MB)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 as XFS (1.1GB)
/dev/nvme0n1p4 as raw (510.7 GB)

Just checking to see if this is running as expected…will post nvme1n1 partition info from this first run once the current one completes.

[Sebastian Roth]

@jmason Hmmm, forgot to tell you that you need to re-upload the image before deployment. Sorry! On upload the *.size files will be generated.

[jmason]

This post is deleted!

[jmason]

@Sebastian-Roth So with the newly captured image also created with the init_nvme.xz as Host Init, I brought the host for deploy up in debug mode .
I ensured that the init disk order nvme0n1 and nvme1n1 matched the same order for when I made the image (Just like I did last week when deploying to my 19 laptops).

…well running again now with the proper init settings and host image.

[jmason]

@Sebastian-Roth Okay after attempting it the third time I’m sure that I have everything assigned appropriately. Still running in deploy-debug the message is confirmed.

After the Preparing Partition layout message I get the An error has been detected! box.

No drive number passed (restore PartitionTablesAndBootLoaders)  
   Args Passed: /dev/nvme0n1  /images/mydiskimage 50 all

Kernel variables and settings:
bzImage loglevel=4 initrd=init_nvme.xz root=dev/ram0 rw amdisk_size=127000 web=http://192.168.0.1/fog/
consoleblank=0 rootfstype=ext4 shutdown=1 mac=macaddressoflaptop ftp=192.168.0.1 storage=192.168.0.1:/images/ 
storageip=192.168.0.1 osid=50 irqpoll hostname=mylaptop chkdsk=0 img=mydiskimage imgType=mpa imgPartitionType=all 
imgid=11 imgFormat=0 PIGZ_COMP=-6 hostearly=1 isdebug=yes type=down shutdown=1

[Sebastian Roth]

@jmason Ok, seems like I haven’t got it correct on the first try. Need your support now to figure out where I went wrong. In debug deploy, after it failed with the error message please run the following commands, take a picture or post the output here:

blockdev --getsize64 /dev/nvme0n1
blockdev --getsize64 /dev/nvme1n1
cat /images/mydiskimage/*.size

My guess is that the disks are not exactly the same size than the ones you have in the target machine but we’ll see.

[jmason]

@Sebastian-Roth said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

blockdev --getsize64 /dev/nvme0n1

512110190592

blockdev --getsize64 /dev/nvme1n1

1024209543168

cat /images/mydiskimage/*.size

512110190592
1024209543168

[Sebastian Roth]

@jmason said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

cat /images/mydiskimage/*.size

512110190592
1024209543168

Argggg, my fault here. Can you please edit the *.size text files and make those look like this:
d1.size:

1:512110190592

d2.size:

2:1024209543168

(just add the the number and colon at the beginning of each file -> will fix that in the init_nvme.xz soon!)

[jmason]

@Sebastian-Roth No problem…it is running now

Partclone window to recap for the linux disk

/dev/nvme0n1p1 raw 134.2 MB
/dev/nvme0n1p2 FAT16 209.7 MB
/dev/nvme0n1p3 XFS 1.1GB
/dev/nvme0n1p4 raw 510.7 GB

windows disk

/dev/nvme1n1p1 FAT32 681.6 MB
/dev/nvme1n1p2 raw 134.2 MB
/dev/nvme1n1p3 NTFS 1.0 TB
/dev/nvme1n1p4 NTFS 1.0 GB

[Sebastian Roth]

@jmason Don’t actually need all the very details (filesystem and size). Just important we know that nvme0n1 was Linux this time. Please try deployment (does not have to be debug) a couple of times and you should see it deploy Linux to nvme1n1 properly as well if the Linux kernel detects the disks in a different order.

[jmason]

@Sebastian-Roth Running it again in deploy debug so I can make sure with lsblk that it initialized the drives in a different order and not have to hope it’s different.

It came up with windows as nvme0n1 this time and nvme1n1 as linux…

The only odd thing was after writing the windows disk…all of the UUID/partition related set lines were just . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . without any values

Resetting UUIDs for /dev/nvme0n1
Disk UUID being set to ........................................
Partition type being set to ..................................
Partition uuid being set to...................................
etc...
...
...
Resetting swap systems

but it appears to have moved on to nvme1n1 and is writing the linux image correctly.

Next steps?

[Sebastian Roth]

@jmason said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

The only odd thing was after writing the windows disk…all of the UUID/partition related set lines were just

Thanks for mentioning this! Definitely something else I missed. The whole scripting code is a huge thing and very easy to miss things here and there. I am still working on this but will have a new version ready for test in the next days.

[Sebastian Roth]

@jmason Took a little while to get this all sorted. Can you please re-download the init_nvme.xz. It should include all current changes and fixes.

See if the *.size files are being generated properly when capturing the image as well as properly setting UUID and type after deploying the partition images.

[jmason]

@Sebastian-Roth the *.size files were generated properly but the Disk UUID, Partition type, and Partition UUID lines still show just the being set to.................................. after writing an image to a drive. It still appears to be writing the images.

[Sebastian Roth]

@jmason Will be a couple of days till I find enough time to re-examine this. Will let you know.