Can backup, but not deploy on 1 machine.... [video inc].
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I have never seen this with my setup, but you say the other 4 laptops are still working great. When you say they are, do you mean that deploying to them works great also, only the image for this 5th laptop has an issue deploying? Can you see the fog menu from this laptop? I know it seems like you’re doing some task on it from the video, but can you get to the menu and register the laptop, or is every part of fog really unaccessible to this computer?
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hi jason.
the other 4 laptops are deploying/uploading just fine. they are all using the same image file too (identical laptop specs).
the problem laptop, laptop 5, CAN upload new images. It access the fog menu just fine, and responds perfectly when there is an active task telling it to deploy the master image - it just wont actually go past the menu in the video.
Since posting, I’ve done a complete new setup. I’ve reformatted both my ubuntu server and all laptops. Started completly fresh and the problem is still happening…This leads me to conclude it MUST be something to do with this laptop specifically - but what I don’t know. It use to work… there’s been no hardware switching. the ONLY difference I can see is it’s using a newer bios than the others…so I’ll try flashing back to a previous bios and see if that fixes anything.
dave
EDIT : Downgraded bios back to 1.70 and has done nothing.
Same errors as before.EDIT2 : Just upgraded the Kernel to 3.8.8, getting a new error now.
[code]
…same as before…
acerhdf: unknown (unsupported) BIOS version TOSHIBA/Satellite U500/1.70, please report, aborting!
sd 10:0:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
sd 10:0:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 10:0:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
sd 10:0:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 10:0:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
sd 10:0:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through[code][/code]
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Hey there Blackbook, I saw that you asked about this same problem it seems at the end of last year. Chad-bisd gave you some suggestions with no luck and now you’ve done a Bios downgrade and kernel update with no luck. You said the 5 laptops are identical and the only difference was the one with a problem had a newer Bios version, correct? What is the exact Model of the laptop? Is it the Toshiba Satellite U500 with Bios 1.70? Or is Fog reading that incorrectly?
Sorry that this reply is asking a lot of questions, I’m just trying to build a complete image of what’s going on. Thank you!
Jason
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What hard drive mode is your laptop set to? If it’s set to RAID in the BIOS, it could be hanging on that.
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Hi jason. Yeah, I tried it all before christmas and kinda got fed up with it so just banished the laptop to a cupboard, but now we need to start using it again (my boss asked ‘‘i thought we had 5 laptops?’’) so I’ve gotta come up with a solution.
The Toshiba Laptops are ‘Satellite U500 PSU9MA-00K013’
Fog was correctly identifying the bios as v1.70 ((It also correctly identified when i was using 1.90)).
To be doubly sure, I just created a new image specifically for this laptop, uploaded it without a problem, but when i try to deploy that image on itself, it hangs in exactly the same way. (???wtf???).
Hi Kevin, The bios the latop is currently using is rubbish and as far as i can see, doesn’t display that information. It’s using the aptio setup utility so if you’re familiar with that, I’m happy to upload pictures or anything that may be useful.
I just loaded the ‘Setup Defaults’, changed boot order back to PXE first and tried - same thing.
Thanks for the help guys. when we nail this, I’ll chuck you all a few paypals for a beer or two
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Just out of curiosity if you have the time to spare to test more, zero fill the hard disk before you try to deploy an image… if you have a linux machine and a usb caddy available, plug it into usb and fill the device using dd.
eg if the device came up as /dev/sdc you’d do:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M
Try that and then stick the drive back in and give it a go. I’ve had a similar problem before due to a drive I was using being in a raid array previously. I’m sure thats not whats happened here but sometimes information in certain areas of a drive being corrupt can affect bios interraction with the device during detection phase… etc etc.
I may be way out with this so dont shoot me if it doesnt help… I just wanted to throw it in as its a possibility.
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So on your laptop there is no option to change the Hard Drive Mode? On the computer I’m pushing an image to right now I can go into the Advanced tab under Drive Configuration and it had the option for “ATA/IDE Mode” - (NATIVE OR LEGACY). I have had to change this from Native to Legacy on some computer and also from ACHI to IDE on some models. It really all depends on the type of computer and type of Bios for each computer, but this sounds like the problem I had on a old old Toshiba model laptop we have here. It gave the ACHI or IDE option, all of them work on ACHI but one, it had to be set to IDE.
I know this is a frustrating thing, but don’t give up. Dig through the BIOS settings and find anything that resembles being a hard drive setting and try altering it. Let us know what is going on still. Hopefully it will be solved soon!
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re-updated the bios to 1.90 and still see no harddrive mode options…which is frustrating because on other bios’ i know exactly what you’re asking me to find…I just dont seem to have access on this piece of ***t.
Angry David
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I figured you had seen that option before. I have some Dell Laptops that I have to image with Part Image or EaseUS Disc Copy. For the life of me I can not get them to image with Fog. I do apologize that I’m not more help to you, but hopefully you can get it resolved. Have you tried to pull a hard drive out of one of the other laptops and put it in this one, just to ensure it isn’t the hard drive?
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I hadn’t done that yet jason, but i have to admit that thought had crossed my mind. it just makes no sense to me that it worked when i setup fog in the first place, but suddenly not one day. Could be corrupt hard drive. I’ll investigate and keep this thread updated.
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update : Just swapped the harddrive of the trouble laptop with another one, and the good laptop deployed a treat, the trouble one froze at same place.
I’ve just gone through the bios to ensure that both are identical and still can’t figure it out. :S
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bump
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Ok, I didn’t forget about you. Hopefully others can respond with better options, but I want to get everything straight in my head. You have multiple laptops of the same make and model. All of them will image just fine except for one. When you swap the hard drive from the one that will not image to one that will image, the laptop that has no problem still has no problem, but the one with a problem fails even with the other hard drive. All of the bios settings are the same on all laptops. The bad laptop is getting to fog, reading out a report about the bios and all, but then freezes? I know this is redundant, but I don’t want you to think we are giving up on this, I just hate having little issues like this that seem to never go away.
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It’s all good jason. Thanks for the reply.
but yeah. what you wrote is completely correct.
Also, I might add that all laptops can upload. Even the ‘bad’ one. It will upload an image just fine. it just can’t deploy anything.
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Alright so Bios update did nothing, but a kernel change made the error message change. I am doing something new which is using the tutorial to build a custom kernel. I’ll test it beforehand, but if it works for me on my troublesome Dells and Toshibas then I’ll let you have it. Maybe it’ll work for you, idk though. I’ll keep you posted, it’s compiling right now.
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Is there anything plugged into the usb ports or flash card in the laptop? I keep seeing that this error is generally another media device that is not able to be cached.
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ok two things;
first - no. no usb in laptop.
second - on closer inspection two laptops (1xworking and 1xshitty) have different harddrive hardware ids. I don’t know if that makes a difference. I assume not as two working laptops also have different id’s - AND - i swapped harddrives between laptops.everything else, settings and hardware wise, is the same.
Still scratching my head over this one.
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for the record, this was never solved/fixed.
I’ve literally no idea wtf is wrong with this unit. After tax time, I’ll just buy some new laptops and use this line as ‘backup’.
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Just revisited this - I set up a brand new ubuntu desktop and installed nothing but Fog on it - I reformatted the problem laptop and did nothing but put 1 txt document on desktop. I also reset the toshiba bios.
To check fog was working, I took a working laptop and did a quick host, an upload, and a deploy all successfully.
I then took the problem laptop, managed to get the PXE to boot to fog menu, did a ‘quick host’ first time, completed an upload (to a new image file) first time also, went to deploy it - and it got stuck at the same place as the video. Just dispays a ‘#’ when it should go to the blue screen.
I’m about to throw it all out the window.
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[quote=“Blackbook, post: 14121, member: 2681”]Just revisited this - I set up a brand new ubuntu desktop and installed nothing but Fog on it - I reformatted the problem laptop and did nothing but put 1 txt document on desktop. I also reset the toshiba bios.
To check fog was working, I took a working laptop and did a quick host, an upload, and a deploy all successfully.
I then took the problem laptop, managed to get the PXE to boot to fog menu, did a ‘quick host’ first time, completed an upload (to a new image file) first time also, went to deploy it - and it got stuck at the same place as the video. Just dispays a ‘#’ when it should go to the blue screen.
I’m about to throw it all out the window.[/quote]
we had a problem child machine we just chose an older kernel for fog and magicly it worked… Our problem child was a Brand New Dell Vostro 2420 brand new out of box one Deployed fine the other we had to change to an older kernel to get to it deploy… Same Bios versions and Ethernet Firmware versions. Identical hardware. Go figure. we stepped back all the way to the 2637 kernel. Hope that helps?