Issue Deploying Image To A Specific Laptop Brand
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Have been using Fog for a couple of years now and it has been working flawlessly for us until a couple of days ago.
Fog is installed on Ubuntu via the git method, Fog is running version 1.5.10.11 with kernel 6.12.35 and we use the ipxe.efi boot file
We have secure boot enabled on all our devices and Fog has been configured to work with this using signed images and deployment files.
We have a single image for Windows 11 and that has been deployed without issue to a load of Dell laptops and desktops. We have also managed to deploy the image to some Stone desktops.
The Stone laptops are proving problematic. They PXE boot and join the task and the image is deployed fine but as soon as the device reboots it hangs with the manufacturers logo displayed on the screen and refuses to post.
I can’t get in to the BIOS unless I pull the hard drive, by some fluke if I put the drive back in the machine will boot but then after a reboot it hangs again. On some rare occasion it will actually continue to work.
I don’t think the issue is with Windows 11 as I can deploy a Windows 10 image and go through the update process and install Windows 11 and the laptop is happy but this isn’t an ideal solution.
I am wondering if the task end sequence and clean up is causing some kind of issue but I don’t really know where to start. As I have said already these laptops worked fine with the Windows 10 image.
Has anyone seen this issue before and able to offer some much needed advice to resolve the issue please?
Thanks
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@AngryITGuy First let me say I don’t use FOG for image deployment any more since I’ve moved to a different IT group, but if this situation hit my desk I would go through a similar process as below
I have more questions than answers for you. But the good thing here is FOG is imaging these systems and can deploy windows 10 to the hardware without issue. Right away we can rule out fog’s foundational support system being broken because it can deploy win10 and win11 to other hardware and win10 to this stone hardware.
When I debug something new or strange I try to build a truth table in my head of different experiments to see what works and what not works. Something like:
Deploy and boot win10 Dell laptop: Yes
Deploy and boot win11 Dell laptop: Yes
Deploy and boot win10 Stone laptop: Yes
Deploy and boot win11 Stone laptop: No (kind of)So now to the unknown questions (and I assume these stone laptops are in uefi mode, you mentioned ‘bios’, but your boot loader is ipxe.efi.
On this stone laptops do you have pxe setup as the default boot source or is it the hard drive? This question is to see if the boot is failing if you are booting through ipxe.efi or if the firmware is having a problem finding the boot partition. If you are booting through iPXE see if changing the boot order to the hard drive solves the issue (for this test).
You will need to turn off secure boot for this next step. If you swap the hard drives between the dell and stone computer, does the stone computer boot normally repeated times? Does the dell computer reboot repeated times OK? This check is to see if the problem moves with the hard drive. The question is around if fog combined with the disk controller hardware on the stone doing something to damage the boot sector for win11 when it deploys. The dells works, can you get the stone computers working by deploying to a dell and then transplanting the hard drive to the stone?
If you deploy win10 and then upgrade to win11 on a stone laptop (verify its working 100%) and then capture and deploy to a same make and model computer. Does it boot correctly on the second computer? Can you deploy it to the same computer it was captured from and does it work? This will test if there is something wrong with your win11 image you are trying to deploy to the stone computer.
Lets see how the above goes before we plot the next test.
Just to recap
- Test booting through iPXE vs firmware booting directly to hard drive
- Swap the hard drives between the dells and stone computers see if the problem moves
- Try to capture and deploy using the same hardware. First to like computer if no work, try to deploy to same computer image was captured from.
