Need Help with Capture and Hard Drive Issue

[bluedude]

@Sebastian-Roth
So I was able to figure out the password to one of the user accounts on Ubuntu. I was also able to get XRDP installed and working. I was able to finally get the information you asked for. Although the bad image that I had, I copied over with a capture that is working. I don’t know if this is going to help anymore, but here is the info you requested.
d1.partitions

d1.minimum.partitions

d1.fixed_size_partitions

[bluedude]

@Tom-Elliott
Hello Tom-Elliott,

I was able to get access to one of the user accounts. Here is the info you requested.
ls -l /var/www

ls -l /var/www/html

[Tom Elliott]

@bluedude Well there goes whatever idea I may have had.

Sorry, it was a thought and didn’t pan out. I tried.

[Sebastian Roth]

@bluedude We see that the partition number two (sda2) was shrunk downto one quarter of the size it normally has but because of the recovery partitions (type=27 is a “hidden” NTFS partition) this image won’t fit onto a smaller size disk anyway. Those partitions three and four are blocking an efficient resize and FOG won’t move the start sector of those because it would break the recovery.

On the other hand I don’t see why a disk could be in an unusable state because of this. The minimum partition table looks just fine and I can’t see (yet?) why a PC wouldn’t even let you access the BIOS settings anymore.

Does the PC boot to PXE? Would you be able to schedule a debug capture task as I said before? We need to get a picture of what’s on that disk. The other ways you could try is to install the disk to a compete different model PC if you have one or download some kind of Linux live boot ISO (Ubuntu Live, SystemRescueCD, …). Whichever you are able to boot up, please open some kind of terminal/console and run sfdisk -l /dev/sda

[bluedude]

@Sebastian-Roth So I am not sure what you are saying in that first paragraph. Are you saying I shouldn’t capture with resizable because FOG can’t resize it anyway? What should then I set the Image Type too then?

Also, I stated that the pics yesterday is from a working image. Yesterday, I over wrote the bad image in FOG with this good capture. Although, the bad image is still on these 4 nonfunctioning hard drives. Whenever I have one of these four hard drives plugged in, even with a another good hard drive with a good image and with PXE enabled with PXE set to boot first, the machine is unable to do anything.

I will try and schedule a debug, but I doubt it is going to work. I will let you know if it does.

[bluedude]

@Sebastian-Roth I scheduled the debug and plugged in one of the four hard drives with the bad image. PXE is enabled and first priority to boot and this is all it is doing.

F2 or DEL does nothing and will not let me continue any further.

[Sebastian Roth]

@bluedude said in Need Help with Capture and Hard Drive Issue:

So I am not sure what you are saying in that first paragraph. Are you saying I shouldn’t capture with resizable because FOG can’t resize it anyway? What should then I set the Image Type too then?

More or less this is what I am saying. The resizable image type won’t help you to make this image fit onto a smaller size disk because the third and fourth are special partitions and seen as fixed by FOG. If you want to keep that partition layout you can just use the non-resizable image type and save you some time as it doesn’t even try to resize then.

So it seems like those disks in the current state can’t be used in your machines anymore. From my experience this is a very rare situation and I can’t remember we had this being reported before.

Do you have a different type of PC/notebook that you could connect the disk to? Do you have a USB/SATA adapter that you can use to connect the disk after the machine booted up so we can take a look at it?

[bluedude]

@Sebastian-Roth Figures I would screw up something this bad. I don’t have time today to try that. I do have a Lenovo desktop, in the building somewhere. Once I find it, I’ll try connecting it to that and see if it is able to boot.

I tried to hot swap in a bad image hard drive. I thought it read you could do that with SATA connections. I kept good drive connected initially, and booted into Windows 10. Once I was in, I reconnected the bad image drive and opened disk management. Unfortunately, it would only recognize the hard drive with the good image. It did not recognize the bad image hard drive. I do not have a USB/SATA adapter,. My buddy may have one. I am going to ask him if he does, if I could borrow it. Although, its going to be a few days before I can do any of this.

[bluedude]

@Sebastian-Roth Hello, sorry it took so long, but I finally got my hands on a USB/SATA adapter. I was able to use disk management to have a look at the drives.

This is what I got as soon as I launched disk management.

I changed it to make it online, and then it changed to this.
Image Continued

The good news is that out of the 5 drives, I was able to use diskpart command via the command line and clean 4 of the hard drives. Once I cleaned those 4 hard drives, I was able to reconnect them and access the BIOS and get to FOG to deploy an image. I think I will just toss the 5th hard drive. Its pretty old and it is only a 80GB drive. Not sure if these photos will give you any information as to why this happened or what I did to cause this.

[Sebastian Roth]

@bluedude Thanks for the update. Unfortunately I have not a clue what could have been wrong with those disk that kept your machine form even booting up. No idea really. Looks pretty alright in the pictures.