I keep forgetting the drawbacks of the USB boot stuff. Now that the latest release is out I might have a bit more time to look into this and maybe make it work. Though this won’t be today.

I looked into this and grub does have a readline (or similar) that we can grab the task name with. I simply haven’t had time my self to script this up yet. In theory it should work.

Follow these instructions. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6350/usb-boot-uefi-client-into-fog-menu-easy-way

Understand this is an idea and have no understanding if it will work under mac hardware. But the idea is to load iPXE much like we load GRUB from the usb stick.

At the current time you can not use multicast with the USB boot environment…

I keep forgetting the drawbacks of the USB boot stuff. Now that the latest release is out I might have a bit more time to look into this and maybe make it work. Though this won’t be today.

@saftkartoffel said:

And the final result is a hfs+ formated partitions. So I guess the raw capture doesn’t capture the image as APFS. luckily a time machine backup will fix the format back to apfs.

I can’t imagine RAW capture will convert a partition formated with APFS to HFS+ or anything like that unless APFS has parts of the filesystem stored in NVRAM - which would be really strange.

@saftkartoffel said in Clear block out of boundary:

but the multicast task doesn’t seems to be recognized bye the hosts

At the current time you can not use multicast with the USB boot environment. In theory it should be possible but we will need to get GRUB to prompt for the multicast task name. So “today” only unicast is supported when booting via usb.

I do have to ask why are you booting via USB? Is PXE booting not supported by your hardware?

Unfortunately no, is there a way for imac to boot directly from network though? And more notes for further research. The unicast now does 100% on other identical machine as the golden master, the previous stuck percentage at partclone is done on an older machine but with the same size of hdd. And the final result is a hfs+ formated partitions. So I guess the raw capture doesn’t capture the image as APFS. luckily a time machine backup will fix the format back to apfs

but the multicast task doesn’t seems to be recognized bye the hosts

At the current time you can not use multicast with the USB boot environment. In theory it should be possible but we will need to get GRUB to prompt for the multicast task name. So “today” only unicast is supported when booting via usb.

I do have to ask why are you booting via USB? Is PXE booting not supported by your hardware?

@saftkartoffel As I see you are using the USB boot stuff. Not part of the official FOG code but I am sure we can help you! Please post the complete grub configuration you have in boot/grub/grub.cfg on your USB key.

I only changed the myfogip

set myfogip=10.35.148.134
set myimage=/boot/bzImage
set myinits=/boot/init.xz
set myloglevel=4
set timeout=-1
insmod all_video

menuentry "1. FOG Image Deploy/Capture" {
 echo loading the kernel
 linux  $myimage loglevel=$myloglevel initrd=init.xz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=275000 keymap= web=$myfogip/fog/ boottype=usb consoleblank=0 rootfstype=ext4
 echo loading the virtual hard drive
 initrd $myinits
 echo booting kernel...
}

menuentry "2. Perform Full Host Registration and Inventory" {
 echo loading the kernel
 linux  $myimage loglevel=$myloglevel initrd=init.xz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=275000 keymap= web=$myfogip/fog/ boottype=usb consoleblank=0 rootfstype=ext4 mode=manreg
 echo loading the virtual hard drive
 initrd $myinits
 echo booting kernel...
}

menuentry "3. Quick Registration and Inventory" {
 echo loading the kernel
 linux  $myimage loglevel=$myloglevel initrd=init.xz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=275000 keymap= web=$myfogip/fog/ boottype=usb consoleblank=0 rootfstype=ext4 mode=autoreg
 echo loading the virtual hard drive
 initrd $myinits
 echo booting kernel...
}

menuentry "4. Client System Information (Compatibility)" {
 echo loading the kernel
 linux  $myimage loglevel=$myloglevel initrd=init.xz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=275000 keymap= web=$myfogip/fog/ boottype=usb consoleblank=0 rootfstype=ext4 mode=sysinfo
 echo loading the virtual hard drive
 initrd $myinits
 echo booting kernel...
}

menuentry "5. Run Memtest86+" {
 linux /boot/memdisk iso raw
 initrd /boot/memtest.bin
}

menuentry "6. FOG Debug Kernel" {
 echo loading the kernel
 linux  $myimage loglevel=7 init=/sbin/init root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=275000 keymap= boottype=usb consoleblank=0 rootfstype=ext4 isdebug=yes
 echo loading the virtual hard drive
 initrd $myinits
 echo booting kernel...
}

menuentry "7. FOG iPXE Jumpstart BIOS" {
 echo loading the kernel
 linux16  /boot/ipxe.krn
 echo booting iPXE...
}

menuentry "8. FOG iPXE Jumpstart EFI" {
 echo chain loading the kernel
 insmod chain 
 chainloader /boot/ipxe.efi
 echo booting iPXE-efi...
}

@saftkartoffel said in Clear block out of boundary:

Well I got Fatal: error unknown request type :: Null
Got a quick fix? need to do the imaging asap

This is one of the caveats of usb booting. You should reread the instructions for building the FOS Linux USB boot disk. It says that you MUST schedule the task first in the Web UI THEN select option 1 on the grub boot menu. If you don’t you will get the error about Unknown request type Null.

Did exactly like that, the unicast works flawlessly but the multicast task doesn’t seems to be recognized bye the hosts

Well I got Fatal: error unknown request type :: Null
Got a quick fix? need to do the imaging asap

This is one of the caveats of usb booting. You should reread the instructions for building the FOS Linux USB boot disk. It says that you MUST schedule the task first in the Web UI THEN select option 1 on the grub boot menu. If you don’t you will get the error about Unknown request type Null.

@saftkartoffel Yes sure you can multicast a raw image.

Well I got Fatal: error unknown request type :: Null

Got a quick fix? need to do the imaging asap

@saftkartoffel When you say stuck, do you mean the byte/sector count in the blue partclone screen did not move any further? For how long did you wait? Did the speed figure go down to zero?

Left it overnight, in the morning the speed is getting lower if I remembered correctly but not to zero

What i meant stuck is the progress bar

So on the deployed mac, I rebooted it and it doesn’t boot normally and stuck on an apple logo. But the boot option is working so i tried booting into a install Catalina usb and choose recover from backup. Luckily I had a local time machine backup on the captured mac. Did the latest local backup restoration for around 15 minutes-ish and it worked and booted beautifully on macOS Catalina 10.15.6

I know this is not great but Apple is doing many things to prevent people from imaging their machines and there is not much we can do about it unless you are keen enough to dive into the code…

1. The fog project is using the latest partclone so if there is a fix it should be in there, but based on your linked article its probably not.
2. Something else popped out, is this disk using any type of encryption? In a typical system the efi partition is not encrypted but the OS partition will be. The efi partition loads the drivers needed to decrypt the OS disk.

First let me say I don’t know apple computers. But this system has been around for 5 years and it probably not running the latest OS. Have you ever been able to clone this type of computer before with FOG? My question is around is the problem computer specific, model specific or all apples are this way? I know other organizations clone apple computers with FOG, so what makes this computer that unique?

https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/support-requests/98/?page=1

It is a known issues on partclone itself with AFPS file format.

I guess i’ll try the structure check tomorrow
Thank you for the advice george. I’ll update the results tommorow

The setting in the fog web interface is a MacOS image, single disk all partition unresizeable. And compressed with zstd.
My other concern is the fog server storage since it has around 860gigs available space where it capturing a whole 1tb of golden master drive

Ok you are already using non-resizable so its not at the point of calculating how to shrink the disk. I would run the structure check just to be sure.

As for disk size zstd will help here. Set your compression level to 11 if its not at least 11 this will help. If you use the standard compression ratio of 1.6 that 1TiB disk should fit onto the fog server at 625GB. Now that assumes your hard drive is 100% full of data with no free space. zstd should be able to compress better than 1.6:1 compression as well as I bet your 1TiB hard drive is not 100% full. So 800GB should be more than enough.