imaging a PC with multiple drives
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Dear FOG developers.
Have been using FOG for years and sometimes we’ve had to re-image or newly purchased PCs that have multiple hard-drives installed (either SATA Hard-drives, SSDs or NVMe drives).
This has caused at times when imaging that a different drive than the one intended is imaged. As a work around we currently remove the drives we don’t need to image, image the PC and reinstall the drives.
Would like to see if there is a way to specify TFTP and PXE to image the correct drive for the OS as a feature.
We are currently using FOS Kernel 6.1.63, FOG 1.5.9 and is installed on Rocky Linux 8.9
Thanks,
Matt
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@mrowand With SSD’s this this is only possible with SATA channels, kinda-ish:
PATA was really the only one we could always guarantee 100% of which order a drive would load up.
On PATA cards you had a ribbon with the end of the cable that plugged to the drive always being the first loaded, middle of the ribbon always being the second loaded. Channel 0 end of cable was always to be /dev/hda, middle on Channel 0 would be /dev/hdb if the end was plugged in.
With SATA you “almost” had it because of sata channels, but Serialized devices also counted against the counts (so if USB loaded first, it was possible a USB drive could take /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc…) So not a 100% guarantee here, which ever Serialized thing loaded first.
With nvme/pci based cards its first come first served based on how quickly the device can power on and present to the system during post. This is completely outside of FOG’s ability to control, so your method of disconnecting everything that you don’t want touched is the best result.
I know it’s not an answer one would hope for, but it currently is the best answer I think.
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Thanks Tom. Understood.
An Idea I had was programming this into the BIOS or requesting HP to make a BIOS/UFEI which has this feature of “channels”
Or using a boot file, such as with secure boot, but that would require HP or Dell or whichever PC manufacturer to make boot files for secure boot.
but this would be out of the scope of the project.
I do appreciate your input though.
Regards,
Matt
