Fog is indexing only sdb
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On FOG 1.5.X with Ubuntu, I’m trying to capture a host that has two disks (sda and sdb).
In the register host selection i see that only dev/sdb gets detected
In the PXE debug environment (lsblk / fdisk -l), both disks are detected correctly.
Host BIOS is in AHCI mode, Secure Boot is disabled.
I created an image with type Multiple Partition - All Disks (Not Resizable).
During capture, only sdb is imaged, while sda is completely ignored.
If I remove sdb fysically from the system, then sda gets captured correctly.
And i have a different system with 6 fysical drives (ACHI) and Secure Boot disabled.
And if i want to image that computer only /dev/sdb gets an image. the other 5 don’t get an image.Thank you for an answer!
Bear -
@Bearr1976 is /dev/sdb larger than /dev/sda by chance?
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@Bearr1976 I’m attempting to rebuild as there was a potential bug where the drive lettering wouldn’t be followed.
Now it needs to be noted:
FOS will attempt to use the largest disk in the machine to determine the drive to use.
I may think about a feature to allow “smallest” drive to be used, but I think in most cases imaging is usually done on a single disk machine or is wanting the largest disk.
Now I could, I suppose, just return the first disk in the order as was done in the past, but I had to make the function a little more robust to account for link based lookups on the disk, serial, wwn, uuid, etc…
So I just added the bit to try to prefer the larger of the disk as the default writing disk.
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@Tom-Elliott Yes my /dev/sdb is bigger. And I love fog for it’s easy to use and always a good backup. How can I find out which version of fog that doesn’t have that problem. I hope that you can help me out.
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@Bearr1976 This problem, in my eyes, is a feature.
In most cases, it’s generally assumed the larger the drive == the main drive.
Now you can force the /dev/sda to be the main drive for this machine by setting the ‘Host Primary Drive’ field on the host (or hosts) in question.
If this is something that shouldn’t be:
How should we determine which drive to use?
/dev/hd<x> vs /dev/sd<x> would be using the hd versions over the sd versions.
Of course each person’s things is different. I might suggest using the Host Primary Device field unless this is too unruly for you?
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@Bearr1976 The reason I cannot give a version is it’s not specific to the FOG version, but rather the FOS version being used (which would pull the latest released FOS file regardless of which version of FOG you’re pulling.)
You can change the FOS (init) files to the one:
2025-04-29 or earlier. -
@Bearr1976 I’m updating the thing so that it will give the first lexilogical drive returned.
If an admin wants to have the largesize as the “primary” they can define it as part of the “Host Kernel Args” or the global (FOG Configuration Settings -> Settings -> Kernel Args ->
largesize="1"to use it.I have to wait for the files to build, but then I’ll ask for them to be pushed as the “Official” release which should do what you’re more used to and provide the feature as an admin choosable thing.
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@Tom-Elliott I am gonna try your advice. But I would like to use fog as a backup and restore for my windows and linux systems. And it would be nice to automate it so that it takes an image of sda and sdb drives. I will wait for the next build. Thank you
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@Tom-Elliott its working by setting /dev/sda to the field ‘Host Primary Drive’ and it takes images from both disks! Thank you!
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Just a little update, fog is capturing the dev/sda twice. That only occurs when “Host Primary Disk” is set to /dev/sda.
And thank you for the support!
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@Bearr1976 If you use the latest init, the primary drive is supposed to be /dev/sda automatically (technically the first in alphabetical order) so by setting Host Primary Disk, may be forcing it to use that specific drive. In your case, if you’re trying to capture multiple disks, I suspect you would need the Host Primary Disk unset. If there’s something else not working right after unsetting please let me know and I’ll try to see what I can do to replicate the issue.
