Hosts not imaging - HELP

[prestop]

@Junkhacker Doesn’t make sense to me - he didn’t have any different computers. What is confusing is that the image on the server is alot smaller than 250G.

[Junkhacker]

@prestop that’s because of 2 things. partclone is file-system aware, and only copies the data in use, and fog compresses it.
however, a non-resizable image is a snapshot of the drive just as it existed on the source computer. when a resizeable image is created, a few more steps are taken before the image is uploaded, like shrinking the partitions down to the size of the data on the drives (plus some buffer space).

[prestop]

@Junkhacker Debug is on the /dev/sda2 now. I guess I find out at the next ENTER.

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
yep…says target partition is too small. I don’t understand that at all.

[Junkhacker]

@prestop if you look in the directory /images/MMHOptiplex7020/ what files do you see?

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
d1.mbr
d1p1.img
d1p2.img
d1p3.img

[Junkhacker]

@prestop oh, right, forgot that we didn’t add the additional files until later and these are from fog 1.2.0.
well, i think it’s obvious what the solution is. you’ll at least temporarily need a bigger drive to recapture this image, or you’re going to have to rebuild this image from scratch. when i say that non-resizable is really strict, i mean exact number of sectors or fewer for destination drive. that means if the source drive was 250Gb and the destination is 249.99GB, it won’t work. there is easily that much variation between drive models of the “same” size.

[prestop]

@Junkhacker does one of these files tell me how big the source drive was?

[Junkhacker]

@prestop not in any easy kind of way, not like an image from trunk would.

[Sebastian Roth]

@prestop I think I already told you that I can tell you the disk size if you upload the d1.mbr file to the forum… Or just run fdisk -l /images/MMHOptiplex7020/d1.mbr and post the full output here…

[sudburr]

My favourite suggestion… have you tried zeroing the destination drive?

You alsop could create a virtual machine with a dynamically expanding 500 GB virtual drive. Image to that then recapture it as single disk resizable.

[Junkhacker]

@sudburr he has, and from the sound of it, he doesn’t have any systems with enough drive space (also, there are problems pxe booting a vm that’s not on a dedicated hypervisor)

[sudburr]

VirtualBox will PXE boot quite happily with:
Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.18-106667.vbox-extpack

Even if the size of the drive data on the image is an unlikely 230 GiB it would still fit on a system running bare Win7 with VirtualBox and a 250 GB (roughly 232 GiB) dynamically expanding virtual drive because the virtual drive will only be the size of the data plus a few extra bits.

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
OK everyone - it looks like you are correct. The last order he placed for 14 machines were a different model with a 500GB HDD. My guess is he made his golden from these and that’s what’s in the FOG server. The ones in the old bug-infested tech room, while he may have used them as test devices at some point, are not the ones he put the images on.

One last question: My new machines I will be getting will have 500G or larger so the image should work. What happens to the left over space? I guess I’m not sure exactly what re-sizable means and how partclone works. Any resource suggestions greatly appreciated.

ALSO - MANY MANY THANKS to Junkhacker, Wayne Workman, Sebastion Roth and all others who stayed with me to get this done. This is an awesome program and you are awesome guys! My gratitude always.

Preston

[Junkhacker]

as soon as you have a system with a large enough drive, deploy your image and recapture as resizable. it will then be usable on all of your systems of that model. a resizable image automatically shinks and expands partitions to fit on different size drives and take advantage of all available space.

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
Fully deploy and then upload right away - as resizable. Multi-partition? I guess there’s the Dell part, the windows part and then the last - I’m not sure how Dell sells them.

[Junkhacker]

@prestop yes, deploy the image with the shutdown checkbox enabled, so the system doesn’t boot, it just images and shuts down. then schedule an image capture with the image now set to resizable. i’m guessing boot, recovery, and system. and btw, if these are “as dell sells them,” make sure you’re correctly licensed

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
Thanks again!