Are PCIe ssd hard drives on client machines supported?

[egregers]

@george1421

I have 1.3.0 RC18 installed and when I try to perform full host registration and inventory I get the message

Cannot find hard disk on system.

The drive is an NVMe hard drive.

Will Fog work with this?

[Tom Elliott]

@egregers How do you know RC-18 is installed?

Can you try rerunning the installer after running:

rm -rf /var/www/{html/,}fog

[george1421]

@egregers What I would recommend (along with what Tom posted) is to pxe boot into the FOG iPXE menu and then run the compatibility tests. This will confirm that the FOS Engine can see the local hard drive. This compat test will tell is where the problem isn’t. (FYI, since you are upgrading from 1.2.0 to 1.3.0 the background of the FOG iPXE menu will look different)

[egregers]

@Tom-Elliott
I did this and now it says I am at RC-19. It says RC-19 on the machine I am PXI booting. It still says Cannot find hard disk on system when I run full host registration.

This is a new fog install. I pointed the dhcp to the new server IP.

[Tom Elliott]

@egregers how is the drive set to show up via bios? Ahci, data, raid?

[george1421]

@Tom-Elliott said in Are PCIe ssd hard drives on client machines supported?:

@egregers how is the drive set to show up via bios? Ahci, data, raid?

Along the same lines, how are these drives setup? Are you using the built in intel raid controller in a raid setup? (I have a T3610, and T3620) so I know FOG works with the precisions.

[egregers]

@Tom-Elliott

This is a new machine and it came from dell with Raid On even though there is only one hard drive.

[Tom Elliott]

@egregers please try setting to ahci

[george1421]

@Tom-Elliott said in Are PCIe ssd hard drives on client machines supported?:

@egregers please try setting to ahci

Not to derail this, but instead of changing the bios, how about doing a debug capture to see what FOS is saying about the drives?

Since this has a single disk installed and its NVMe, the OP probably has a M.2 disk installed directly on the motherboard, so there is no sata based disk installed in this computer at all.

[egregers]

@Tom-Elliott
That worked, but it causes the OS to blue screen.

[Tom Elliott]

@george1421 because it’s listed in raid but the raid is not presenting in a software state that might work… Just need the I’d it’s listing with I suspect

[Wayne Workman]

@egregers said in Are PCIe ssd hard drives on client machines supported?:

@Tom-Elliott
That worked, but it causes the OS to blue screen.

You will need to install the OS in AHCI mode, or risk a dirty image by doing some sort of repair. Sorry.

If it were me I’d just re-install so I know my image will be absolutely clean and void of any issues.

[Tom Elliott]

@Wayne-Workman I have a strong feeling that we should be able get this with it’s current state.

Essentially, I think we just need to see what the RAID is presenting as under lsblk/blockdev so I can add it to the code.

[Wayne Workman]

@Tom-Elliott It’s not that FOG can’t capture it, it’s in AHCI mode at this point. It’s that the image is “RAID On” but the firmware has been switched to “AHCI”.

[Tom Elliott]

@Wayne-Workman the switch was only because I asked him to as the disk in raid mode was not displaying in fog. I just asked him to switch to ahci to see if fog would see it then.

No image has been uploaded yet, nor anything modifying the disk so switching back to raid should enable it to boot again.

[Wayne Workman]

@Tom-Elliott of course switching back would fix booting.

But, the path with less work is the one where the image is built on AHCI mode. This will require someone switching each host to AHCI mode once.

Taking an image made with “RAID On” mode, when deploying that image, will require switching to AHCI mode for Imaging and then back to “RAID On” mode.

If the image was simply made on top of AHCI mode to begin with, less work needs done now for Imaging, and in the future.

[Tom Elliott]

@Wayne-Workman what I’m trying to say, I want to try figuring out if fog actually does see the disk when in raid on or not. I’m thinking it does but we have filters that tell the init which identifiers are able to be used. I’m suspecting that the engine can see the disk just fine, but the scripts aren’t due to this id. I only asked for ahci to make sure fog actually can see the “real” device, not so we can capture the image from one mode, and change the mode back to boot it. Once we have the data we should be able to put it on any drive independent of the mode that’s presenting the device.

[Wayne Workman]

@Tom-Elliott If you give me instructions, I can flip one of our dells into “RAID On” and see.

[george1421]

@Wayne-Workman said in Are PCIe ssd hard drives on client machines supported?:

@Tom-Elliott If you give me instructions, I can flip one of our dells into “RAID On” and see.

for this to be an accurate test, you need to have a Dell precision system (preferably the same as the OP). But to answer your question, if you go into the bios (bios mode) and goto System Configuration -> Sata operation you can change the mode there.

FWIW: We never change this setting from “Raid On”, but we don’t use fog to image the few Precison T3610/3620s we have either. I have a fresh 7040 on my build up bench with an onboard NVMe disk that I can test too if needed.

[Wayne Workman]

@george1421 Sorry for not being specific, I meant instructions to see how FOS sees the drive. Tom was talking about an ID ?