Dualboot with two Drives (SSD) and make FOG decide to boot each OS

[thomGee]

Hi there,
I have installed windows on one drive and Linux on the other.
In addition i want rEFInd on the Linuxpartition to have the user a nice way to choose the OS.

Actually, I’d like to have it automatically booting Linux in the evening and Windows at daytime.

Is it possible to change the FOG-Image in a way, to decide which local Drive to boot from?

I could make in both OS’s a Autotask to reboot at a specific time. So only FOG has to change the default local bootdevice in its image to change the default OS

I think there might be 2 Images to be switched on the FOG server
or to change the iPXE-Setting in FOG via Script. Right?

But how to change this in the right time (ex. with cron?)

Any ideas?

[george1421]

@thomgee well if you think about this, you are pxe booting into the ipxe menu, after a timeout ipxe calls refind to boot the computer. So if you have a daytime refind.conf and a nighttime refind.conf file Then you can switch between the two disk partitions without interfering with FOG programming.

First let me say I haven’t worked with the refind menu, but I know it exists. I think from within refind you can pick a timeout or default boot partition. So I think one could leave your menu selection option in place so the user could pick the other partition, but then change your default boot partition.

So the next question is how to swap out the refind.conf file, well you already hit on it, setup a bash job that is run by cron to swap out the daytime and night time versions of the refind.conf file. Everything in FOG will work exactly how it did before and updates to FOG will not disrupt your boot order switch.

[thomGee]

@george1421 Thank You for beeing so fast
I’ll try that in my Lab-Environment.
Fortunately, I have a little time until the pool has to be online.
But than it has to be bulletproof

I am also not used to rEFInd yet, but so far i like it.
I think I even found something to look for HD-Labels.
With SSD in UEFI this may hopefully work with several PCs

But further Ideas are welcome