One partition not expanding after deploy

[dforce]

Hi,

I have a hard drive with DOS table and 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition. Within this extended partition there are 3 logical partitions (2 ext4 Linux and a swap).
I am using the compression method “Partclone Zstd” and “image type Resizable”.

After capturing the disk I want to deploy it to other machines but when all is done there is one partition which is not expanded as it should be. This is the first logical partition (/dev/sda5) which has the boot for the Linux machine.

d1.partitions
label: dos
label-id: 0x612b3879
device: /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start = 2048, size = 1024000, type=7, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start = 1026048, size= 818176000, type=7
/dev/sda3 : start = 819202048, size = 819200000, type=7
/dev/sda4 : start = 1638404094, size = 2268624898, type=5
/dev/sda5 : start = 1638404096, size = 878899200, type=83
/dev/sda6 : start = 2517306369, size = 1379879424, type=83
/dev/sda7 : start = 3897185794, size = 9836544, type=82

d1.minimum.partitions
label: dos
label-id: 0x612b3879
device: /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start = 2048, size = 1024000, type=7, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start = 1026048, size= 818176000, type=7
/dev/sda3 : start = 819202048, size = 819200000, type=7
/dev/sda4 : start = 1638404094, size = 2268624898, type=5
/dev/sda5 : start = 1638404096, size = 18920857, type=83
/dev/sda6 : start = 2517306369, size = 4269039, type=83
/dev/sda7 : start = 3897185794, size = 9836544, type=82

d1.fixed_size_partitions
1:4:7

What could be the problem ?

Thanks
Miguël

[Sebastian Roth]

@dforce said in One partition not expanding after deploy:

After capturing the disk I want to deploy it to other machines but when all is done there is one partition which is not expanded as it should be. This is the first logical partition (/dev/sda5) which has the boot for the Linux machine.

Did you mean “root” instead of “boot” here? Why do you expect or want sda5 to get expanded??

In the other topic you said that this did work in older versions of FOG. Please tell us more. Has the partition layout been always like this? I am just asking because dual boot setups are not as easy and I kind of doubt that earlier versions of FOG did expand this layout to a larger disk with the last partition (sda7) being Linux SWAP.

In this case expanding one the Windows partitions (sda2, sda3) or Linux root partition (probably sda5) would mean that FOG would need to also move the start location of some of the other partitions. In a DOS partition layout this can break the system (boot loader) very easily and therefore FOG usually doesn’t expand those kind of layouts and it never did as far as I know.

[dforce]

@Sebastian-Roth
I never noticed that problem with dual boot systems. Everything worked fine. I noticed it when upgrading the Linux system and having the error that there was not enough space on “/dev/sda5”. At that moment I was using the version 1.5.7 and now with the latest version 1.5.8.
The partition “/dev/sda5” has a normal size of 419 GB and the partition “/dev/sda6” has the size of 657 GB. When deploying the partition “/dev/sda6” expands to the normal size but the partition “/dev/sda5” just gets the size of 8.9 GB.

Looking at the disk structure then everything starts at the normal start offsets (as mentioned in d1.partitions and d1.minimum.partitions), just the gap between “/dev/sda5” and “/dev/sda6” is set as an unallocated space.

Why does the partition “/dev/sda6” expands to the normal size and the partition “/dev/sda5” not ?

[Sebastian Roth]

@dforce Ahhhh, now I see. Thanks for explaining in more detail. I had the impression you expected FOG to move sda6 and sda7 further back on a larger disk and expand sda5 to full size. But I was wrong on that one!

Sure you are right that FOG should properly expand sda5 just as it does with sda6 in your case. But then on the other hand I wonder why you use resizable image type for this at all. Just switch the image to non-resizable, re-capture the image and deploy. sda5 will be full size then I am sure!

The resizable image type is made for situations where you have a partition layout for example with a 500 GB Windows partition on the last position and you want to capture and deploy that to a machine with 250 GB disk. FOG will shrink, capture and expand after deploy to match the smaller disk size. That’s what is intended for. If you don’t need to deploy do smaller size disks, then you just use non-resizable image type.

That said I might still try to figure out why sda5 doesn’t expand as it should when I find a bit more time. Probably not this week.

[dforce]

@Sebastian-Roth
Thanks for the information.

Using non-resizable solved this problem.