Select Target Disk in Quick Image
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I work for an independent computer repair store and we want to use Fog for installing images to computers that need an OS reinstall.
We have a test environment set up using an svn checkout (currently at r2968) so that we can use Quick Image without registering systems. This works pretty well but the technicians have expressed concerns about the way Fog automatically chooses the target disk.
Primarily, they are worried that Fog will overwrite a disk not intended to be imaged. For instance, a system may have multiple disks and the first one Fog finds may not be the OS disk. In some systems, this could be the customer’s extra data disk. In one specific instance, we found that the OEM installed a cache SSD that is enumerated before the regular hard drive, which caused Fog to install there instead of the actual hard drive.
What we’d like to see is a simple menu that lists the physical disks, along with their partition structures so we can choose which disk should be imaged.
I would be willing to help work on this, but I will need some pointers on where it needs to go in the system.
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Ask and it is simple enough.
All done.
SVN 3262 released.
This release adds a new feature an new FOG Setting category called Non-registered Host Image. In this option comes a FOG_NONREG_DEVICE field that you simply place like you would the kernelDevice on a host. This will then be read during imaging and target that specific device as long as it exists. I believe it fails if that device does not exist. This is a global value, so if it’s set, any Non-registered host regardless of image chosen will attempt to choose this disk. It’s simple enough to fix though in that all you need to do is delete the setting in order to have it choose the device for you.
Hopefully you enjoy,
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While I understand this isn’t exactly what you were asking for, it’s actually quite complicated (for me at least) to have a selection of which devices are really available. I’m going on a limb, though, that most of the devices that you’ll be imaging will have a sort of similarity.
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I always do a copy of all disks of my client computer, and then i disconnect all except OS disk.
No mistake and only 15 seconds lost -
Wow, thanks for the quick response!
I do agree that ideally, people should just remove the disks they don’t want affected. Unfortunately, we do sometimes run into systems where it’s difficult to do, especially in the case I mentioned where the system was an all-in-one of some sort (Dell, I think) that had an SSD cache disk as the first drive. In those cases, it’s much more than 15 seconds to disassemble the whole thing, hunt down the offending SSD (hopefully it’s in a socket that can be accessed easily), and remove it.
The feature in r3262 is helpful, but I don’t think it will work for us. When we have to specify a disk, it will have to be on a case-by-case basis. If, for example, we set it to use /dev/sdb as fdrive, then it will have to be changed back when we go back to a more “normal” use case (i.e., most of them).
Of course the solution I mentioned would be the ideal one, but I think the bare minimum we need would be a field presented to the user after selecting the image that just lets them set the fdrive parameter from there by typing it.
Seeing where you made the change did help me understand what’s going on a bit more. I will spend some time looking at the system and see if I can come up with a patch to submit so you don’t have to spend a lot of time on something that’s admittedly an edge case.
