Issues When Selecting 'Deploy Image' on HP Elitebook 850 G8

[TKurtz12]

Hello everyone!

Let me start by saying I inherited a FOG server from an employee who no longer works at my school district, and have been very familiar with using it but not managing it. I’ve been delving in more and more and have had a lot of success until this strange issue, so I figured I’d see if anyone smarter than me regarding FOG would have any ideas.

We have some new HP EliteBook 850 G8 laptops that we are deploying. They do not have a built in Ethernet port, but I was successfully able to get them to boot to FOG by setting up our DHCP for both UEFI and Legacy, and by disabling Secure Boot and passthrough MAC in the BIOS. Yay! The good news is, I can get the adapter (a USB-C dock we had on hand) registered as a host and both capture and deploy images that way. So I am up and running and can do what I need to do… mostly.

Here’s where I get a bit confused. When I boot to FOG and try to select Deploy Image, I do not get to the screen where my list of images are. Instead, I am prompted for my password and sometimes it has me press enter two or three times before proceeding. Then, instead of seeing my list of images, I end up booting to what I think is Client System Information (Compatibility) option. The list on this page says:

1. Reboot
2. Network Information
3. Partition Information
4. Check Fog Compatibility
5. Ping a Host
6. Display MAC Address
7. Show DMI Information
   Please enter your choice:

Again, I can deploy an image from a task, but not on the fly. So I guess my question would be: Is this because we’re using a USB-C dock/adapter, or do I need to do more configuration with my UEFI stuff on DHCP, or could this be something else I do not know about? Is my GUI somehow just not working right and instead of taking me to the deploy image selection menu, it takes me to the compatibility menu?

In case it helps, we are running FOG version 1.5.9 on Debian 9 and DHCP on Server 2016. I find it interesting it’s only happening on these laptops. I have successfully used UEFI booting on some HP desktops so I know at least part of my DHCP setup is working haha.

Thanks all! I know you were a great help to the former FOG server admin on my team, so I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

[Sebastian Roth]

@TKurtz12 Ok, there you go. Found several topics on this issue:
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/15779/deploy-image-menu-not-coming-up
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/15778/hp-elitebook-840-g8
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/15940/hp-probook-g8-issues-imaging
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/15715/problem-i-can-t-restore-image-on-hp-probook-450-g8-650-g8-430-g8

Carefully read through all those and you’ll see that some people even contacted HP support on this already. But I don’t think we have any positive feedback from them yet.

[TKurtz12]

@sebastian-roth Thanks for the reply!

I will look at that iPXE documentation and start there.

Thanks for all you guys do!

[Sebastian Roth]

@TKurtz12 I think this is the second or maybe even third time I read this in the forums. No idea why this happens yet. You might start off by finding those topics in the forums and we’ll take it from there.

One thing you might wanna try first is compiling iPXE from the latest source code. We have a script and documentation for that so it’s fairly easy: https://docs.fogproject.org/en/latest/reference/compile_ipxe_binaries.html

See if that makes any difference.