Two HDD - 3 OS Win 10 - Multiboot

[Brico]

Hello (I’m French, I don’t know how to say “Bonjour” in a forum… Sorry).

Our PC owns two HDD: 1 SSD and 1 SATA.
We install first Win 10 on the SSD.
Then we install two others Win 10 on the SATA.
At the end, we have a multiboot PC with 3 OS Win 10.

If we clone the complete PC, all is working fine.
The 3 OS are working fine.

Thank you Fog ! Really !

Now, we try to clone only one partition.

We tried to clone the Win10 partition on the SSD, but we obtains a strange result:

• the target PC don’t boot.
• After having repaired, we see that the second SATA has not its real size: its size is divided by 2 (250 Go instaed of 500 Go). The second OS of SATA had desapeared.

If we clone again all the PC, it is repared, no problem.

We are shure we have tried to restore the Win 10 of the SSD (and not a small partition at the beginning of the SATA: UEFI, reserved to system, …).

My question : is it possible to clone only one partition ?

The solution is not ?

• restore one Win 10 partition,
• and then restore “small” partitions of the SATA (UEIF ? “reserved to system”, …) ?

Thanks for all.

Best regards.

[Sebastian Roth]

@brico said in Two HDD - 3 OS Win 10 - Multiboot:

We tried to clone the Win10 partition on the SSD, but we obtains a strange result:

How exactly did you try to clone the Win10 partition on the SSD only?

Which version of FOG do you use?

[Brico]

This post is deleted!

[Brico]

Thanks for your help.

I think we use 1.5.9 (I’ll verify monday afternoon).

For cloning, we create a new image:

• “Image type”: “Single Disk - Resizable (1)”,
• Partition: “Partition 3 only”.

Then, for restoring:

• in “Group Management” we choose the target PC, and select “Multi-Cast”.
• we boot the target PC and PXE make the cloning starting.

No error appear during cloning.

Thanks for all.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Brico From what you describe I would think it should work. Though I am wondering why you would Multi-Cast to a single machine (maybe you deploy to more than one and I just got it wrong).

Deploying single partitions is not as simple as it might sound. One very important thing you need to keep in mind is that if you have an image defined for a single partition it won’t deploy the partition layout for you but only the data of that single one partition. So you need to have a full deployment including the partition layout and all partitions on each machine before you can deploy a single partition to it.

I am wondering if the two disks are causing a problem here. But with SSD and normal SATA disks Linux should not switch device names as it does with NVMe drives.

So what I might suggest is you schedule another single partition deploy but this time enable the checkbox Schedule as debug task in the FOG web UI, when creating the task. Boot the machine up as usual and you should get to a command line instead of the task just starting (hit ENTER key when asked to). Here you run lsblk so see the disks and partitions listed. Probably you see “/dev/sda” (first disk) and partitons as well as “/dev/sdb” (second disk with partitions). Now run fdisk -l /dev/sda and fdisk -l /dev/sdb (the option -l is a lower case L, not the number “one”). Take pictures of all three commands and post those here.

[Brico]

@sebastian-roth
Well. Below are the results.

Finally, we’d like first to clone the /dev/sdb3 partition.

After, it’l be great to clone /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3.

Thans for all !!
Best regards.

[Tue Jun 01 root@figclient /]# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda    8:0  0 465.8G  0 disk
|-sda1 8:1  0    16M  0 part
|-sda2 8:2  0 231.4G  0 part
-sda3 8:3  0 234.4G  0 part

sdb    8:16 0 238.5G  0 disk
|-sdb1 8:17 0   100M  0 part
|-sdb2 8:18 0    16M  0 part
|-sdb3 8:19 0 237.9G  0 part
-sdb4 8:20 0   511M  0 part

[Tue Jun 01 root@figclient /]# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 465.78 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: WDC WD5000AAVS-0
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: D9139164-888A-48BF-B12B-A1B51B952553D

Device        Start       End   Sectors   Size  Type
/dev/sda1      2048     34815     32768    16M  Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda2     34816 485253119 485218304 231.4G  Microsoft basic data 
/dev/sda3 485253120 976773119 491520000 234.4G  Microsoft basic data 

[Tue Jun 01 root@figclient /]# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 238.49 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors
Disk model: Sandisk X600 M.2
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 72E30632-D423-4C4E-9B81-A977B8583A5F

Device        Start       End   Sectors   Size  Type
/dev/sdb1      2048    206847    204800   100M  EFI System
/dev/sdb2    206848    239615     32768    16M  Microsoft reserved
/dev/sdb3    239616 499068125 498828810 237.9G  Microsoft basic data 
/dev/sdb4 499068928 500115455   1046528   511M Windows recovery environment

[Sebastian Roth]

@Brico Ok, I should have read your message more careful. Here we see the partition layout after you’ve tried a single partition restore I guess, right? I assume it is because we see the 500 GB SATA drive with two big partitions.

Well, it’s good to know what this looks like on the deploy machine. Now I may ask you to schedule a debug capture task on the machine you pull the image from, boot it up and run the exact same commands there too and post output here so we are able to compare. Will be interesting to see of the SSD drive is also sdb there.

[Brico]

You’re a genius !!!

I’m working in network and systems since 20 years. I repeat: “You are a genius”.

On the source machine, the SATA disk is plugged, on the motherboard, on SATA1. So, the SSD is /dev/sda, and the SATA /dev/sdb.

On the target machine, the SATA disk is plugged, on the motherboard, on SATA2. This make: the SSD is /dev/sdb, and the SATA /dev/sda !!!

On the target machine, I plugged the SATA on the moterboard on SATA1. I verify that SSD is /dev/sda and SATA is /dev/sdb.

The image “Single disk - resizable - Partition 3 only” was restored successfully to the target PC.

ALL IS WORKING FINE !!!

May I ask you an other question ?

I’m not able to save and restore the 2 partitions on the SATA disk (/dev/sdb2 and /dev/sdb3).

I’ve tried “Single disk - resizable - Partition 6 only”, and “Multiple partition image - All disks (not resizable) - Partition 6 only”, but the capture don’t make anything (I’ve seen, but I’m not sure, that the system tried to capture /dev/sda4).

Thanks for all. Thanks for all enough.

Best regards.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Brico Great to hear you figured it out and I could point you the right direction.

Now about your other question. I think this should be possible to do by using the host setting Host Primary Disk. Set this to /dev/sdb for both the capture host and the deploy host if you want to get a single partition from “sdb”. Then in the image settings use “Multiple partition image - Single disk (not resizable)” (the other two might work as well for single partition but I would use that) and for Partition set “Partition 2 only” / “Partition 3 only”.

[Brico]

@brico

Yes one time enough !

“/dev/sdb” works !

But it’s a little dangerous:

• we create a partition image for “/dev/sdb2” by example,
• we select a host and restore this image WITHOUT put anything on “Host Primary Disk”.

Then we’ll restore on the first disk ! And destroy /dev/sda !
That’s right ? Isn’t it ?

So, we’ll try to create 2 hosts (for the same PC):

• one host named “pc-01-HD1” (hard disk number one)(with nothing on “Host Primary Disk”)
• a second named 'pc-01-HD2" (hard disk number two)(with “/dev/hdb” on “Host Primary Disk”.

But FOG refuse: they have the same MAC address…

It’s not an important problem. We have to be carefull next time we’ll restore partition on seconde HDD.

Thanks for all. Really !!!

Thank you Fog !

Best regards.

[Sebastian Roth]

@brico said in Two HDD - 3 OS Win 10 - Multiboot:

Then we’ll restore on the first disk ! And destroy /dev/sda !

YES! You really need to be careful when deploying. While single partitions are even more tricky you have to be alert when deploying anyhow. Deploy will overwrite whatever is on disk. Thinks can go wrong if you don’t take care of what exactly you do.

So, we’ll try to create 2 hosts (for the same PC)

As you have seen, this is not possible. The basic concepts of FOG don’t allow for more than one host object in the database with the same MAC address.