PXE Boot HP X2 210 (Hybrid tablet Windows 10 Pro)

[george1421]

Where I’m confused is this.

I understand that mmcblk0 is a physical disk and it has 4 partitions. I’m good with that. But the concern (in my mind) is what is mmcblk0rpmb, mmcblk0boot0, mmcblk0boot1 which also appear to be disks and how will fog deal with them. I might suspect that mmcblk0rpmb is the firmware of this device, and then there are two disks for the boot code, maybe a primary and a backup (??) But that is only a guess.

The question would be will this confuse the fog boot kernel? I guess we will need the fog devs to answer on that one.

[Tom Elliott]

@george1421 mmcblk0rpmb is not used at all -> kernels that we have published actually prevent this disk from being seen. The only other part that may be a bit “weird” is the boot0/boot1 disks, but those aren’t even read in in the case of resizable images.

[george1421]

@Tom-Elliott From what it sounds like something is not allowing the fog client OS to boot. One thought was that it couldn’t enumerate the disks or something similar, but that is only a very uneducated guess.

[Tom Elliott]

@george1421 I understand, I was just giving information pertinent to your prior posting.

Though I will have to add, mmc disks are actually working, so if it’s stuck on the disk it would be a bit odd. From the sounds of it, it’s either stuck (meaning maybe just taking longer to load – I’m guessing you’ve waited more the 2-5 minutes with the same results?), or impatience.

[Wayne Workman]

I suppose the simple things have been checked, for instance removing any extra storage devices like SD cards and MicroSD cards ?

[Matthieu Jacquart]

@Wayne-Workman Yes, there’s just internal SSD and RJ45 adapteur
@Tom-Elliott I’ve been waiting much more than 5 minutes, around 1 hour, and still nothing…

Something interesting, I have some error message when I choose boot from hard disk or memtest86 :

Just testing with last svn / kernel 4.4, same trouble

[george1421]

@Matthieu-Jacquart If you are willing and have a general knowledge of linux, I would like you to try something.

I’ve been working on an idea about booting the FOG Client kernel (the bits of FOG code that run on the target computer to load or capture images) using a usb drive. Understand this is only for debugging purposes. Right now it is not clear in my mind if the booting issues with these newer efi based systems are with the PXE boot kernel, the FOG Client kernel, or the hand off between ipxe and the FOG kernel.

To test this I wrote a document to create a uefi boot media that will boot the fog kernel from USB. You can not capture or deploy using this kernel only access command line tools. But the point of this exercise is to see if it boots, period.

If you have a spare 2GB or larger usb flash drive, are comfortable with some linux commands and have a little time; could you follow the instructions outlined here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6532/usb-boot-target-device-into-fog-debug-os/3

For the sake of the test, I only want you to execute what appears id method #3. Understand these instructions were written for ubuntu, but they should translate to debian without issue ( ) . At the bottom there is a copy and paste section where you can copy the commands paste them into a text editor, change the reference to the usb flash drive and then just execute the commands one after another through a remote terminal. It takes me less and 5 minutes to execute the commands once you have the apt-get files installed.

For the flash drive start with a freshly formatted flash drive using a windows computer and format it fat32 (note the first step of my instructions tells linux to reformat the drive, any existing content will be lost). If you have any questions about this, please post back here.

What I want to test:

1. Does it boot?
2. IF it doesn’t boot is there an error message?
3. Does this image boot on any other device you have that is in uefi mode?

After this test we will add in the grub insmod commands and test again. But first lets see if you can build the boot drive and get it to boot on this table as is.

[Matthieu Jacquart]

@george1421 ok, Here’s the result… I don’t know what to do with that

[Tom Elliott]

@Matthieu-Jacquart I need more information. You’re having issues getting fog to boot ON the hybrid, or you’re having issues with iPXE passing the information back to the tablet to allow booting to the actual Hard Drive?

[Matthieu Jacquart]

@Tom-Elliott Oh, my English is too bad to well understand…
I can access to the fog menu with the hybrid, but only with efi file. And after fogmenu, I can’t launch any options : I’ve got error with options “boot on hard drive” and “memtest”

and for other options (quick image, or quick / full registration), screen stay black.

[Tom Elliott]

@Matthieu-Jacquart Want to hit me up on chat and maybe we can teamviewer?

[george1421]

@Matthieu-Jacquart It looks like the grub.cfg is not formatted properly. For now I will sit down and wait to see what Tom is able to do for you.

[Matthieu Jacquart]

@george1421 Do you think I made a mistake ?
I can try to do usb key once again ?

[george1421]

@Matthieu-Jacquart From the error it sounds like something is confused in the grub.cfg file only. I would check to see if there isn’t something missing in that file.

[Matthieu Jacquart]

@george1421 ok, I plug usb key on another computer and I had same result

[george1421]

@Matthieu-Jacquart

Sorry I was not clear, busy morning here.

What you need to do is to look at the configuration of the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file on the flash drive. You can edit this on a windows computer or via linux. I’m suspecting that this file is either missing (you skipped a step) or the structure is not what grub expects. If you still can’t get it to work, I have a captured image on my home computer that I can post tonight. That way all you have to do is to write it to a flash drive and there are no other steps that are needed.

[Matthieu Jacquart]

@george1421 Indeed, there is no grub.cfg in boot/grub…
27/01/2016 09:33 <DIR> i386-efi
27/01/2016 09:35 <DIR> locale
27/01/2016 09:33 <DIR> fonts
27/01/2016 09:33 <DIR> x86_64-efi
27/01/2016 09:33 1 024 grubenv
27/01/2016 09:35 <DIR> i386-pc

But there’s a grub.efi in EFI/boot folder

I’m going to home, work day finish for me, I’ll continue tests tomorrow !

[george1421]

@Matthieu-Jacquart OK, I will have something for you in the morning, cheers.

[sarge_212]

Just FYI, I had to manually make the grub.cfg file. Running grub-install on an ubuntu box didn’t make the grub.cfg file as expected.

[george1421]

@sarge_212 said:

Just FYI, I had to manually make the grub.cfg file. Running grub-install on an ubuntu box didn’t make the grub.cfg file as expected.

Yes this is expected. The bash script posted here will create the complete image file without having to mess around with running this and editing that.
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6532/usb-boot-target-device-into-fog-debug-os/19
But it does require having all of the grub2 files downloaded either through yum or apt-get as you would need if you manually executed the files. Understand this process is still under development but it works for me, as they say.