m.2 PCIe SSD not recognised in FOG

[JJ Fullmer]

@Toby777 Awesome! That’s good to know. Hopefully they’ll be able to fix it so that nvme works without using raw but the fact that it works at all is awesome! How fast is it uploading? RAW is typically much slower but those pci based drives are supposed to be crazy fast, just curious how fast.

[Toby777]

@Arrowhead-IT The notebook and FOG server are on a Gigabit connections and at the moment, the upload rate is displaying 5.14GB/min

What’s the implications of using RAW when restoring to drives larger than what its currently being imaged? Will it just be a matter of manually expanding the partition to take up the remainder of the space?

[JJ Fullmer]

@Toby777 I think it might still work on larger drives and you can manually expand the partition. That’s pretty good for RAW from what I’ve seen. Trouble with RAW is that it does every sector of the drive no matter how much space is taken up. Before multiple and extended linux partitions became supported I only used it for very specialized images for computers that were always the same size hard drive.

[Toby777]

@Arrowhead-IT ok cool… well the image on the server came to 20GB. That’s from a 256GB SSD and the Image Compression setting set to 6. Still not too bad actually considering a captured Windows 10 image from the previous model XPS 13 with a 256GB SATA disk using Single Disk - Resizable is about 17GB.

Now I guess the big test is to restore the Image on to the same machine and see if it boots.

[george1421]

While this is probably injecting noise into this thread. We will typically create our reference image on a VM with 1 vCPU and 40GB hard drive. With fog we will use a single disk non resizeable (only because 1.2.0 didn’t work to good with resizeable disks in our environment.) but anyway, in the setupcomplete.cmd file we would run a script to expand the logical disk to the size of the physical disk. It worked well. In this setup we capture the image without the drivers for the final target computer so the image comes in at about 5GB on disk for a thin Win 7 image and about 15GB for a fat win7 image with office and other apps. Then just after the images are laid down on the target computer we use the fog post install scripts to inject the right driver pack from the fog server to the target computer. This saves us about 15GB in space on the target computer that we don’t have to upload (once) and download for each OSD. Also as new hardware is released we just need to update the drivers on the fog server, there is no reason to recapture the image.

[Sebastian Roth]

Here we go. I found some time to look into this more closely!
Download init.xz/init_32.xz files to test https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-bOeHjoUmyMazJLZDhGaEl5VTQ&usp=sharing and put into place in /var/www/fog/service/ipxe/ or /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe/ (probably a good idea to rename the original files instead of just overwriting them!)

Please test and report back if capturing/deploy is working (Image type: Multiple Partition - Single Disk, Host Primary Disk: /dev/nvme0n1).

[Wayne Workman]

@george1421 said:

Also as new hardware is released we just need to update the drivers on the fog server, there is no reason to recapture the image.

That’s pretty slick. But it requires a lot of knowledge - and I’ll admit you seem to have a lot more skills than I do, likely from your experience.

For me - a 6TB drive is awful cheap, and I can update an existing image before lunch. We have 22 images, one or two for each model. Keeping an image per model is simple to me, and deployment is more simple for both myself and co-workers. We can afford the drive-space and we have the time to make images.

[george1421]

@Wayne-Workman said:

For me - a 6TB drive is awful cheap, and I can update an existing image before lunch. We have 22 images, one or two for each model. Keeping an image per model is simple to me, and deployment is more simple for both myself and co-workers. We can afford the drive-space and we have the time to make images.

See the key/trick to this is that there is only one or two images for all systems. I don’t have to keep track of what the target computer is, because there is only one image. In our case we release a new golden image every quarter with all of the latest windows and application updates. If you have 22 images that would be almost impossible to do. In my situation I can tell you that a Dell 790 or 9020 have the same image on it as a e7404 or e7550 (sans the model specific driver). If there is an issue impacting a 790 I’m almost assured that it will impact all models, so I fix it one, I fix it for all (in theory).

[Toby777]

@Sebastian-Roth Thanks for that! I will download and test and let you know how it goes.

[Toby777]

I’ve set the image to Single Disk - Resizable and removed the custom entries in the Host’s Primary Disk field.

It all looks good when recognizing the disk… however it appears to be stuck at the following…

I’ve tried repairing the MBR just in case but still seems to be stuck at this point when attempting to capture an image.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Toby777 Thanks for testing and reporting. Have you tried non-resizable (Multiple Partitions - Single Disk) yet?

[Toby777]

@Sebastian-Roth No I haven’t as yet sorry. I went to try that today but the notebook will no longer boot up lol. Won’t even POST.

So have contacted DELL to organise a replacement. Will let you know how it goes after that.

[JJ Fullmer]

@Tom-Elliott is on top of this problem
Check out this forum post https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6315/hp-z640-nvme-pci-e-drive/37
I’m posting my results of testing on the /dev/nvme0n1 type drives with his current inits found here

32 bit Init: https://mastacontrola.com/init_32.xz
64 bit Init: https://mastacontrola.com/init.xz

To use them do the following

cd /var/www/fog/service/ipxe
sudo mv init.xz init.bck
sudo mv init_32.xz init_32.bck
wget https://mastacontrola.com/init.xz --no-check-certificate && wget https://mastacontrola.com/init_32.xz --no-check-certificate
sudo chmod -R 775 ./

Granted by the time dell gets you a replacement it might already be tested enough and the fix will just be in the latest trunk. But that’s what to do in case anyone else is looking.

[Toby777]

@Arrowhead-IT Thanks for letting me know.
Dell haven’t yet fixed up the notebook as yet. Still waiting on parts.
Have updated to those inits. Will test as soon as the notebook is fixed and report back.

[Toby777]

Hi all,
Apparently there’s a delay with the replacement motherboard for the new XPS 13.
So you guys can most likely close this case for now as I noticed that @Arrowhead-IT has confirmed that it’s resolved in the latest trunk.
Cheers

[Tom Elliott]

@Toby777 i don’t want to solve a cased until I’m sure your issue is fixed. Hopefully that is understandable. When you can please just let us know if this can be solved for sure. Thanks.

[Toby777]

@Tom-Elliott Ok no dramas. Will test as soon as the notebook is repaired by Dell. Cheers

[Toby777]

Hi Tom,

Got the Dell tech to replace the motherboard today.

Latest Fog trunk now recognises the nvme SSD.

When the Image is set to Single Disk - Resizable, it hangs at…

* Saving original patition table......................

When Image is set to Multiple Partition Image - Single Disk (Not Resizable), it hangs at…

* Now FOG will attempt to upload the image using Partclone
* Processing Hard Disk: /dev/nvme0n1

When Image is set to Raw Image, it starts the upload…

I’m fine with using Raw Image if that’s what works.

[Tom Elliott]

@Toby777 Was this indefinitely hung, or did you wait a minute and then retry?

I’ve been seeing some “hanging” but it does continue to run, though I’m not 100% if this is truly the same case with the nvme drives.

At least I now know the raw capture still works

[Toby777]

@Tom-Elliott I did leave it running for 5 mins but it still had not progressed on either one except Raw.