How to manually upload an existing image

[Wayne Workman]

@dolf I’d urge you to try a non-resizable image in fog first. See if it works. If all the computers are identical they will all have the same size HDD. It’ll either work or not. If it works, that’s how you do it for this model.

[dolf]

OK so while the imaging runs, I’m reading code.

CloneZilla saves the partition like this (from the log file clonezilla-img

partclone.ntfs -z 10485760 -N -L /var/log/partclone.log -c -s /dev/sda2 --output - | pigz -c --fast -b 1024 -p 16 --rsyncable | split -a 2 -b 4096MB - /home/partimag/2016-07-12-21-img-eelabtest/sda2.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz. 2> /tmp/split_error.TMVF3J

Fog does it like this (from savePartition() in src/buildroot/package/fog/scripts/usr/share/fog/lib/funcs.sh)

partclone.$fstype -fsck-src-part -c -s $part -O $fifoname -N -f 1

I’m not really sure how the FIFO buffer works, but it’s called /tmp/pigz1, so I guess it’s the same as piping the output of partclone through pigz, which is exactly what CloneZilla does. Therefore, maybe this would be sufficient to “convert from CloneZilla format to Fog format”:

cat sda2.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.* > d1p2.img

In other words, no recompression is needed. Am I missing something here?

[dolf]

I created a new image in the Fog web interface, copied the d1.* files from a very similar image, and replaced d1p*.img with concatenated versions of the CloneZilla images. Currently deploying, and partclone seems happy thus far. Just wondering whether the resize will work…

By the way:
Sorry for the delayed responses. It typically takes me 45 minutes to deploy a 65GB image. Without compression the shortest time should be around ((65×1024)MB ÷ (100÷8)MB/s) ÷ 60s = 88 minutes. There’s a 100MB switch somewhere between here and the server

[dolf]

It works! The minimum partition size is probably wrong, but I will only deploy to larger drives in any case.

[Wayne Workman]

@dolf Wow awesome man, way to go! I had serious doubts about this being easy!

Can you please lay out details on all your steps to help people in the future?

[Quazz]

@dolf Could also be a CAT 5 cable somewhere.

[dolf]

Feel free to put this in the wiki if you think it’s worthy.

I’m working with a Windows 7 installation, where sda1 is a small boot partition and sda2 is the large partition called C:.

1. Use GParted (from your favourite linux disc or GParted Live) to resize sda2 to a minimum.
2. Use CloneZilla to capture the disk. I used beginner mode with the savedisk option. I transferred it to /home/user/czimg/… on the FOG server over ssh, but you could use a USB HDD or any other method.
3. Create a new resizable image on the FOG web interface. Note the image location.
4. Create the location specified in the previous step, e.g. mkdir /images/fogimg
5. Do magic:

cp /home/user/czimg/sda-pt.sf /images/fogimg/d1.minimum.partitions
cp /home/user/czimg/sda-pt.sf /images/fogimg/d1.partitions
cp /home/user/czimg/sda-mbr /images/fogimg/d1.mbr
echo "1" > /images/fogimg/d1.fixed_size_partitions
echo "/dev/sda2 ntfs" > /images/fogimg/d1.original.fstypes
cp /home/user/czimg/sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa /images/fogimg/d1p1.img
cat /home/user/czimg/sda2.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.* > /images/fogimg/d1p2.img

The last command will take the longest. If you want to see something happening, install pipe viewer and replace the last command with:

cat /home/user/czimg/sda2.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.* | pv > /images/fogimg/d1p2.img

Have fun

[Tom Elliott]

@dolf Maybe, with this addition, I can create some code that can do this automagically? May not be a while but I think it could be very useful. Of course I don’t know if gunzip will work if say the CloneZilla image is not already compressed.

[Wayne Workman]

@Tom-Elliott Or if something besides beginner mode is used in CloneZilla

[dolf]

If the CloneZilla image is not compressed, it will not have the .gz extention (easy to check for), and the last command becomes:

cat /home/user/czimg/sda2.ntfs-ptcl-img.* | pigz -stdout > /images/fogimg/d1p2.img

If CloneZilla was invoked using dd, we can concatenate and pipe to partclone:

cat /home/user/czimg/sda2.ntfs-dd-img.* | partclone.$fstype -fsck-src-part -c -s - -O - | pigz -c > /images/fogimg/d1p2.img

etc… There might be a few more cases to consider.