Surface 3 Fails to Image

[Sebastian Roth]

@wwarsin Sorry for my late reply. Have been without internet for some days. Hope you are better again!

Yes, bzImage is the kernel. Re-download and put in correct path (/var/www …) if you have upgraded. But there shouldn’t be a need to upgrade right now if you don’t see other issues. Probably best if you don’t to hopefully have more stable test results.

Looking forward to the video.

[wwarsin]

@Sebastian-Roth

I’m finally back in the office for a few days! Here’s the video: https://youtu.be/UFYNan98lmw This is with the Vanilla bzimage.

[Sebastian Roth]

@wwarsin Looking at the last few lines of output it seams a bit like FOG doesn’t find any partitions on your device. It says “Saving Partition Tables (GTP)” and then “Task complete” straight way.
Can you please run a debug session on the surface and see what you get from lsblk

[wwarsin]

@Sebastian-Roth

Here’s a picture of the command;

I have in “/dev/mmcblk0” in Host Primary Disk

[Sebastian Roth]

@wwarsin I am really sorry that it seams like we have just been turning in circles! But I might have an idea of what is wrong here now. Spent a long time closely looking at the pictures and videos you posted and I might have found something.

Picture and video show version 5798 (FOG boot logo message) which FOG polls from the server. But later on it says “Re-reading Partition Tables”. As far as I could find out in the code repository this string was changed in version 5752. So I am pretty sure you have version 5798 installed on the server but your init files did not get updated on the last upgrade - so the clients booting up use an older version.

Please try this on your FOG server (as root!):

cd /var/www/fog/service/ipxe
mv init.xz init.xz_old
wget https://fogproject.org/inits/init.xz
chown www-data:www-data init.xz

Then try booting your surface again. Hopefully this will make a difference!

Tom has changed the disk/partition enumeration from lsblk to fdisk lately. So I am really keen to see if this is working on your device out of the box. Looking forward to hearing from you!

[wwarsin]

@Sebastian-Roth

Success! It’s capturing the image now!

I’ll write back a little later, i’m going to try a deploy after this finishes to verify it works completely.

I appreciate all of the help you and Tom have been!

[wwarsin]

@Sebastian-Roth
So close! Now i’m getting the following error when i try to deploy:

Checking write caching status on HDD…Failed

Could not set caching status (enableWriteCache)

Edit: I still have “/dev/mmcblk0” set as the Host Primary Disk

[Wayne Workman]

@Tom-Elliott I think center alignment of those pieces in that picture below don’t look very good. I suggest making only the initial logo/credits box be centered, and everything else left aligned.

[Sebastian Roth]

@wwarsin Great! Can you please run another debug session and let us know what you get from hdparm -i /dev/mmcblk0

Yeah, pretty close we are indeed!

[wwarsin]

@Sebastian-Roth

Here’s the output of the command:

# hdparm -i /dev/mmcblk0

/dev/mmcblk0:
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument
 HDIO_Get_IDENTITY failed: Invalid argument
#

[wwarsin]

@Sebastian-Roth Any updates by chance?

[Wayne Workman]

@wwarsin Interestingly we got fog 1.2.0 to image a Surface 3 the other day. I couldn’t understand why trunk wouldn’t work

Have you updated recently and tried again?

[Sebastian Roth]

@wwarsin Thanks for reminding me on this! Can you please go for another debug session and run hdparm with a different parameter to see how this behaves: hdparm -W /dev/mmcblk0

[drc0nc]

@Sebastian-Roth I’m using the streams on this, and they’re running into the exact same problem with the mmcblk0 drive.
after running both hdparm -i and hdparm -W i was getting failed invalid argument.

[Sebastian Roth]

@drc0nc Thanks for letting me know! @Tom-Elliott Seams like we need to look into this again and find a way to check for writeCache without it failing on mmcblk devices. Any ideas? Maybe check the return code of hdparm?

[Tom Elliott]

@Sebastian-Roth the write cache problem was only a warning, but I did come up with a fix I think anyway. There was no error code returned that showed there was or wasn’t a problem, so the fix I’ve added is to check the variable we store the check in. If the value has write cache with a value of not supported or is blank we won’t try enabling write support to begin with.

[Sebastian Roth]

Looks good from my point of view. @wwarsin and @drc0nc could you try updating to the very latest and give it a try?

[drc0nc]

@Sebastian-Roth Works just fine now! thanks guys…

[Wayne Workman]

@Sebastian @drc0nc Please let us know what kernel you used, what version of FOG, what boot file, what USB to Ethernet adapter (the model), what kernel parameters or HDD parameters, and anything else special that you’ve done to get this device working.

I’m going to add this device to the Wiki’s working hardware list, that’s why I need all that stuff.

[drc0nc]

@Wayne-Workman
Fog trunk 6327
boot file ipxe.efi
usb to ethernet adapter with ASIX AX88772B chip usb2 to 10/100. (I’ve been testing out gig to usb 3 adapters but no luck booting so far)
Host Kernel Arguments has_usb_nic=1
Host Primary Disk /dev/mmcblk0
I’m using the HP Streams. I believe you already updated the wiki pertaining to these. We’ve lost the ability for a little while but @Tom-Elliott got it squared away.