nvme0n1p2 fatclone c: is not in a valid state

[Psycholiquid]

@george1421 Also I have run chkdsk multiple times and it doesn’t help. Seems to be that same partition over and over. windows sucks, I don’t think they even thought about this when they designed it. In order ot get my vol license image onto a surface I have to upgrade the surface OS, I can’t just install it. So that means I have to do reg hacks and such just to be able to sysprep it. I have heard the same complaints form people who use MDT also, so its not like they are trying to squeeze people out.

[Psycholiquid]

how do I get debug to show up in the FOG menu?

[Psycholiquid]

@Psycholiquid nvm I found it.

[Psycholiquid]

@Tom-Elliott This is what I was afraid of, the disk is GPT because that is the UEFI way it was setup. Which is which way most computers are going (All Surfaces are this way)

So where do I go from here?

[Sebastian Roth]

@Psycholiquid While you are in debug mode, can you run fsck /dev/nvme0n1p2

Is this the exact error you are seeing in partclone “Filesystem isn’t in valid state. May be it is not cleanly unmounted.”???

[Psycholiquid]

fsck.vfat: not found
error 2 while executing fsck.vfat /dev/nvme0n1p2

[Psycholiquid]

@Sebastian-Roth Yes that is the error I am seeing in partclone.

[Psycholiquid]

@Sebastian-Roth I can tell you that is the EFI partition of windows that is used to boot it, but I have made sure I am shutting it down cleanly. I have even set the sysprep to shutdown rather than reboot.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Psycholiquid Are you able to mount the partition in debug mode?

mkdir -p /mnt
mount -t vfat /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
ls -al /mnt
umount /mnt

[Psycholiquid]

@Sebastian-Roth yes it does mount and I can see the file structure

[Tom Elliott]

@Psycholiquid What if you add 1 to the d1.fixed_size_partitions file? Will it work then? It looks like it’s growing the EE partition when it really shouldn’t be.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Psycholiquid Looking through the partclone code I found out that there is a thing called “clean shutdown bit/flag” within the FAT (file allocation table). This sounds like it could be related to the NTFS dirty bit but is definitely a whole lot different - after all it’s FAT not NTFS. When searching the web for FAT and dirty bit a lot of people point you to the 0x41 byte (0x25 fog FAT16) of the partition which seams to be some kind of mount/fs-check/dirty marker as well but it’s definitely not the one partclone is complaining about! The one I found is relevant sits in the second reserved FAT entry. This is the best/simplest description I could find - and here another one. With that information I was able to replicate the error message you are seeing. The problem is I used a hex editor and dd to modify this on disk - so I don’t have an easy solution yet. Interestingly enough - even if partclone complains about it I could still mount the filesystem (just as you could). So I have no idea why partclone is checking this flag (where mount is not!) and who/what set this on your system?!?

I haven’t found any tool that would set/unset this “clean shutdown flag” for you. Linux fsck only un/sets the dirty bit AFAIK. Some say you can use windows chkdsk tool but I am not able to confirm this. In your case nvme0n1p2 is the EFI boot partition and I am not sure if you are able to run chkdsk on this partition from within a running windows system?!

I guess we could come up with some C-code to do this for you. Here is a nice example on how to read that flag.

I wonder if anyone else has looked into this yet? Is anyone aware of the difference between dirty bit and clean shutdown bit here in the forums??

[george1421]

@Sebastian-Roth While I don’t have an answer for you on the shutdown part, I wonder if the developers of partclone would have checked this flag on a fat partition, just because of the nature of the fat I would suspect its not necessary. They must do this for a reason. Maybe they can provide a switch to ignore or even reset this bit in the disk structure if possible. Windows 10 is here to stay so they will run across this issue more often than not.

I wonder if the state of this flag could be dependent on the issue I posted before (from memory). I wonder if when the system is sysprepp’d instead of shutdown you pick reboot and then power off the device when it is working through post before it boots. (it may be impossible to catch because of the speed of the system).

[Psycholiquid]

@Sebastian-Roth I was trying the chkdsk this morning within windows I had to add a drive letter to the partition. Not sure if it will work yet, taking a raw image of the machine (of course that works but not efficient) to make the powers that be happy.

chkdsk is what I usually did to any drive that gave this problem. Let me roll it back to the current bad state and try that and I will let you know the results.

[Psycholiquid]

@george1421 I tried both reboot and shutdown, I am not sure catching it while it is EFI booting would have an effect, since it is already flagged as soon as it goes down. I think it is getting flagged during the sysprep due to I have rebooted it multiple times. Or maybe even being flagged during the switch to Audit mode. I am attempting the clear from within windows this morning to see if it helps.

[Psycholiquid]

@Tom-Elliott said:

@Psycholiquid What if you add 1 to the d1.fixed_size_partitions file? Will it work then? It looks like it’s growing the EE partition when it really shouldn’t be.

Not real sure what your talking about here.

[Tom Elliott]

@Psycholiquid I kept thinking it was download for some reason.

[Psycholiquid]

@Tom-Elliott Ahh ok.

[george1421]

@Psycholiquid Can we isolate this issue to this specific hardware? Its unclear to me (at this distance) if your issue is with the M.2 disk, the device, or something crazy that win10 is doing.

Thinking about it, I’m not sure trying to duplicate this on different hardware is the answer either. Unless you could build a reference image on different hardware and then deploy to this troubled system.

Is it safe to assume you are not using mdt to create your reference image.?

[Psycholiquid]

@george1421 Correct I am not using MDT to create them. I am however seeing this same result off of the Surfaces. So I will break down what I am using and that way we can all see what is happening:

System 1) HP Z240 using NVME drive.

I am creating the image by starting machine up and going through the normal windows start motions for a new machine (basically it is OOBE when I get it) I then upgrade the machine to Enterprise by switching the key. I then install all software I need and make changes. I then switch it into Audit mode (running sysprep). From there I place my Unattend.xml and launch it using elevated command prompt.

System 2) MS Surface 4 Pro using NVME drive.

I am creating the image by starting machine up and going through the normal windows start motions for a new machine (basically it is OOBE when I get it) I then upgrade the machine to Enterprise by switching the key. I then install all software I need and make changes. I then switch it into Audit mode (running sysprep). From there I place my Unattend.xml and launch it using elevated command prompt.

So basically they are both using similar hardware in regards to the drives (Not sure on the MB part though)