Fog - Ubuntu with UEFI

[Oratorian]

I created an Ubuntu 20.04 image using

Multiple partitions - single disk

everything is fine expect that ipxe is not able to boot the system afterwards.

I tried using refind , grub_first_hdd and grub
but ipxe refuses to reboot the vm.

[george1421]

@Oratorian said in Fog - Ubuntu with UEFI:

everything is fine expect that ipxe is not able to boot the system afterwards.

Please explain this. Are you saying that when you boot through the iPXE menu and then it defaults to boot from the hard drive refind is unable to find the uefi boot loader? What happens if you remove PXE booting in the firmware and just let it boot to the local disk?

[Oratorian]

Ok a bit more detail here, sry i was working for hours on a solution.

I created a VM and installed Ubuntu 20.04 in UEFI mode onto it.
I pushed the image onto FOG until now everything works wonderful

When i reboot “of course all VM’S are set to boot from network and in uefi mode”
ipxe starts up and i get into the ipxe boot menu, first menu entry Boot from Local disc.

From there on nothing happens. ipxe is not able to find either an efi partition nor any bootable system. I tried to set the exit mode to REFIND,GRUB,GRUB_FIRST_HDD and even,GRUB_FIRST_WINDOWS but nope.

If i reset the vm and choose boot from harddrive on the VM’S Bios setup ubuntu just starts fine.

[george1421]

@Oratorian Well for the easy part, the grub entries are only for bios mode, so those won’t work on a uefi system. With FOG 1.6 I’m hoping the devs can add in the uefi versions of grub to give us a few more options than refind.

Ok so if the uefi firmware can find the boot partition and load, at least you know the disk can be cloned successfully and the image isn’t broken.

So now for refind, there is a config file in /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe directory that may need to be tweaked to look in more locations for the uefi boot loader. It would also be interesting to know if you deployed that image to a physical machine would it boot using refind? Meaning the image is OK its just how refind is interacting with the VM. The scanfor variable may need to have more areas added, and if you know the path to the bootx64.efi on the target partition you can define a specific path in the refind.conf file.

[Oratorian]

@george1421

i just deployed the image to my laptop and i get the same behavior there.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Oratorian May I ask which VM hypervisor you use? VirtualBox doesn’t even PXE boot in UEFI mode as far as I know and other VMs might have another specific issue. So please let us know.

[Oratorian]

@Sebastian-Roth

VMWare Workstation Pro 1.5.5.6

[Sebastian Roth]

@Oratorian I have not used VMware in a long time but I am sure there are people here in the forums…

[george1421]

@Oratorian said in Fog - Ubuntu with UEFI:

i just deployed the image to my laptop and i get the same behavior there.

Then I one might think its something in the image or the way fog is laying down the image. (just looking at it from a truth table perspective).

I have vmware workstation on my office computer, but I’m on holiday for a week now. I have proxmox in my home lab and guess I can setup a ubuntu 20.04 image and see if I can clone it and the boot via fog. I do have both a ubuntu 20.04 and Centos 8 FOG server both running 1.5.8 version of FOG.

[Oratorian]

@george1421

Is it normal that FOG cant deploy a linux image on a machine that had windows installed on it?
The Linux image was captured with multiple partitions, single disk.

I always get I need to rezise the partitions error even after doing a full wipe on the target maschine.

[george1421]

@Oratorian If your linux partitions are regular partitions then FOG can resize them. If the are LVM partitions then FOG can’t resize those yet.