Is there a way to deploy only 1 partition of my image?

[Thiago]

Sorry if it is a dumb question…
I have an image of a dualboot system Debian8/Win10 that works perfectly.
Now, in one machine, my Win10 is broken. I would like to know if i can deploy only the win10 partition.
My debian is different from the saved image and I do not want to change it again.

[Wayne Workman]

@Thiago You probably can by editing the various small text files in the image’s folder. I would strongly recommend making backups of these files before you change them.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Thiago You should be able to skip deploying particular partition files by renaming them (e.g. mv d1p2.img d1p2.disabled). Should tell you “Partition File Missing” for sda2 but will still continue doing all the other things.

@Tom-Elliott There is also the “Partition” option within the image definition. Selecting “Partition 2 only” works great for upload but will totally mess up your client if you try to deploy this to a machine because it does not have d1.partitions or d1.mbr but creates the default full size NTFS partition…

[Thiago]

@Sebastian-Roth Selecting “Partition 2 only” will be my next step when i update the image, selecting only Debian partition for upload, maintaining Win10 intact. (correctly?)
Renaming files simply works!!

[Sebastian Roth]

@Thiago Please do not try the “Partition 2 only” setting! At least don’t deploy it to any machine! It will screw it! Let’s wait what Tom thinks about this.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Developers Today I somehow got reminded of this… From my point of view restoring a single partition is a very dangerous thing as we have it in FOG trunk right now (if you restore lets say Partition 2 only it will still do all the usual steps - delete your whole MBR, create a full size NTFS partition, restore the MBR - and therefore wipe all your other partition data!) and should definitely not make it into a release as is! Was this feature ever tested? Should we work on making it save or should we remove it?

[GoodGuyQ]

@Sebastian-Roth Thanks for this info. i came to ask about this very same issue, but luckily found this thread before doing so.

Ubuntu 14.x
Fog: 1.3.0 (7581)
Client OS: Win 7/10

I have an 1TB hdd. I create 2 partitions; C/D. The OS partition (C:) is small, like 300GB. The partition can be different; sometimes its XX files, sometimes it is GG files. The would always be the same. I was hoping to have the functionality of taking independent partition images and burning them separately, but I understand why this is a difficult task. Windows has its own boot partition is one issue.

Anyway, the point of the post is to say, it would be cool to have, but I would say it is a low priority - even to someone like me who would use it often.

Now to find ways to boost the speed!

GGQ

[Sebastian Roth]

@GoodGuyQ While this issue has been fixed back then I think it never really got tested by the users (who are a hell lot better at finding the odd bits and pieces that we developers just don’t think about)!! Would be awesome if you can give it a try and let us know. Be aware that things might go wrong. So always keep a full image at hand.

That said you could also do things like skipping only one partition out of three (and still do the MBR) by renaming the image files on your FOG server. Try renaming /image/<image-name>/d1p2.img for example to skip_d1p2.img and it should be skipped while deploying. At least it worked in older revisions. Let’s hope I didn’t break that when working out the single partition cloning stuff.

Looking forward to hear if it is working for you!