Imaging just the second hard disk on a host for data

[Trevelyan]

Hey all, wondering if anyone could help with suggestions;

We need to put about 50-100GB of data onto around 500 PCs, onto their second hard disk. We could upload a new image with the second disk as a multiple partition image, but this isn’t resizable (and it would be ideal to shrink the image down and then expand to the full disk size once finished). RAW is impossible - we have 1TB drives.

So is it possible to target a second disk on the PCs and multicast that way? I saw “Group Primary Disk” as an option - so this would be /dev/sdb, logically - but would this work if all the disk was was an NTFS partition with lots of data on?

Cheers guys!

[Wayne Workman]

@Trevelyan The only way to find out is to play around with it.

I’d suggest first creating a single partition disk resizeable image - and then just specify in the host’s general properties which Host Primary Disk to use. To find out what that is for the 2nd drive, boot into a debug upload task, and just find the name that fog uses to refer to the 2nd disk. It’ll be in the devices virtual file system ( /dev ), it’ll likely be /dev/sdb but you must look to be sure. Specify the correct Host Primary Disk in the host’s properties page and then do an image capture as usual.

Then try to deploy that image to a test machine (not your golden machine) and just see what happens. Make sure you specify the Host Primary Disk parameter for the test machine.

If that works as you want, try it on a different model test machine, with maybe a different sized hdd in it. See what happens.

Please let us know how it goes and what you learn.