Panasonic Toughbooks Cloning
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Howdy everyone,
I am new to FOG but I was aware of it because we used it at my last job. I just wasn’t the one doing the setup. I followed the guide and got it set up on Ubuntu on an isolated network. I was hoping to use it to standardize and maintain a bunch of toughbooks for the local fire department. Images seem to upload fine and deploy fine as well but every time the machines start to boot into Windows fail and then try to run the startup repair. I now that we didn’t have this issue at my previous job and there we worked mostly with Dell Optiplex and Latitudes. I don’t know if I am doing something wrong, I am using the Single Disk, Multi-partition Image.
A few other things I have noticed as odd… when I reboot the Ubuntu machine the services aren’t starting automatically. This maybe because of my only passing knowledge of Ubuntu. I typically just run the install again and it restarts everything that is needed. The dashboard also shows the correct number of images for each day, but on the reports page the only day I can report on was the first day it was up. I don’t know if any of that is related to the issue above or not. Let me know if you need anything else from me.
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Are you using sysprep when building your image? Not using sysprep could be the cause of the failed first boot of Windows.
If you’re using Ubuntu 12.04/12.10 then it’s a known issue with rebooting. The “solution” is to use an older version of Ubuntu, such as 10.04.
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Ok, since it was a brand new installation I went ahead and redid FOG on an Ubuntu 10.04 installation. I haven’t yet experimented with that but hopefully the reboot issue is resolved.
I wasn’t familiar with sysprep, I hadn’t done it on the XP machines I had used before. I read what I could find on it and this time a did FOG Prep like before and then sysprep. At first I tried OOBE with Generalize checked. I had the same kind of boot problems on different files this time but same results.
In some of the things I read about sysprep it talks about building an answer file and doing a fresh install of Windows 7 and going in to audit mode to add all the applications and change settings. I already have the computer sitting like I want it and I am going to the same model of laptop when I deploy the image. Is all the set up necessary? Should I be able to run sysprep on the machine that I want to image and go from there without starting over with an entire Win 7 reinstall?
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You will need to sysprep. I recommend building a single machine as you want it, uploading that machine’s image to FOG (which will be specific to that machine) i.e. “Machine_A_PreSysprep”, keeping that image in case you need to rehash the sysprep, as from my experience, once a machine is sysprepped, it cannot be sysprepped again (unless of course you erase the sysprepped HDD redeploying the pre-sysprepped image) After sysprepping a PC you like, upload image without reloading into Windows.
Here are some files which may help you, including some answer files with more or less everything stripped out just to get you started. One thing I can recommend regarding the answer files is to use WAIK for Windows 7 (WAIK4W7). I believe you can find it from Microsoft for free as a download.
[url=“/_imported_xf_attachments/0/210_ImagePrep.zip?:”]ImagePrep.zip[/url]