Detail on how fog handles different OSs

[Julianh]

Dear all,

I want to learn a bit more about the way fog, 1.20, handles the different operating systems disks when imaging.

For example when creating an image, you select a windows 7/ 8.1/ Linux etc. what are you changing in the behaviour of fog. What changes in the way it treats the disk?

If fog doesn’t understand a partition, I thought it imaged the partition as a raw image. Is there a way to make it treat the first partition as raw, but the others as fat 16 or whatever they are? Even if the first is fat16.

Thanks

Julian

[Tom Elliott]

@Julianh,

The different OS types is more a mechanism of knowing which OS’s are allowed to be resizable. In the specific case of Windows 7 - 8.1 (and up maybe?) it also (when resizable) tells it to replace the BCD with a generalized BCD so your systems will maintain their ability to boot up even if the OS is not sysprepped. Other than this, there is such a minimal difference in it what happens it’s most likely unnoticeable.

Specifically speaking, in the case of Windows 8 and 8.1 it runs a check of whether the OS is installed via MBR partition tables or GPT.

There is no way, to my knowledge, of telling the system to image specific partitions as raw/imager format. This is mostly because, programmatically speaking, it just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible, it’s just easier to use specific partclone files based on a Filesystem format type than it is to try having a customized means to tell the system what type of format to image under.

[Julianh]

Thank you Tom, I’ve been imaging 2008 & 2012 servers, using windows 7 as the OS. I was a bit puzzeled as to why it was working! All installs should be MBR.

Is there a way of taking a raw image of the BCD data?

The OS I’m Imaging is, not windows, and am prepared to “pay” in storage such that, I take an image of the server, then send that same image down to the same machine. I’ll repeat that for each server. I know it’ll be heavy on the storage. Some of the OS partitions are fat16, so I want to use the features of fog for,these partitions, rather than use a “raw” image

Thanks for your help

Yours

Julian

[Junkhacker]

[quote=“Julianh, post: 47352, member: 24986”]Thank you Tom, I’ve been imaging 2008 & 2012 servers, using windows 7 as the OS. I was a bit puzzeled as to why it was working! All installs should be MBR.

Is there a way of taking a raw image of the BCD data?

The OS I’m Imaging is, not windows, and am prepared to “pay” in storage such that, I take an image of the server, then send that same image down to the same machine. I’ll repeat that for each server. I know it’ll be heavy on the storage. Some of the OS partitions are fat16, so I want to use the features of fog for,these partitions, rather than use a “raw” image

Thanks for your help

Yours

Julian[/quote]
OS “other” and non-resizable is what you’re looking for, by the sound of it.
out of curiosity, what OS is it?
fyi: fog has built in detection and support for ext 2, 3, and 4, ntfs, fat, hfsplus, and uses raw for what it can’t detect. so, you’ll probably find that the image takes up less space then you think.