Resizing issue maybe?

[adame]

@Sebastian-Roth Setting the image to 1:2 worked like a charm. Loaded up windows just fine after it finished. Will I need to do that with every image or is that something on your end you can do? I don’t mind if I have to edit it manually for each one.

[Sebastian Roth]

@adame Thanks for the picture. This things is your partition layout is not really “the typical clean install of windows” that we usually have. So FOG is kind of tripping. You have two hidden NTFS partitions (type 27) which is kind of unusual. I’ll see if we can change the scripts to work for your partition layout as well.

What is that first partition for anyway??? Second is the boot partition and third is windows, right? But the first?!?

[adame]

@Sebastian-Roth Sorry for the late response. These came from Panasonic. The 3rd partition is the system recovery partition so we are able to restore to factory settings. Also has 64 and 32-bit of the OS in it. They don’t send out recovery media at all. Kind of sucks. We spend like $3,000 a piece on these and we can’t even get $5 jump drive with the recovery media on it without requesting to get one for a small fee.

[adame]

@Sebastian-Roth But I’m assuming that’s where a lot of laptops have been going these days. Granted most still come with recovery media but they have that extra partition primarily for factory resets. The thing I’m going to love about fog is if that hard drive took a crap I have a “factory reset” on the fog server so I don’t have to purchase the media.

[Sebastian Roth]

@adame said:

But I’m assuming that’s where a lot of laptops have been going these days.

Absolutely. Lots and lots of different setups and it’s not very easy to kind of auto-discover and do assumptions on partition scheming! There are too many things that can go wrong. I checked our scripts and thought about adding a check to see if windows boot files are found on one of the partitions.

@Tom-Elliott what do you think about this idea? Find BCD on one of the partitions and if we find it mark this partition and all the ones before it as fixed size! Not sure if this would break other weird partition layouts.

[adame]

@Sebastian-Roth And if you can’t, it’s not the end of the world I’m sure but you might want to add it to the wiki on how to do this so you don’t have a bunch of posts regarding this. I only need to do it to maybe 10 images. The rest are desktops with the general Windows partitions. I just imaged a desktop and it flew right through it without any edits.

[Tom Elliott]

Is there a potential update on any of this?

[Sebastian Roth]

@Tom-Elliott Well, I am still waiting for you to tell me your opinion on my suggestion of adding a script that can run on the FOG server which will go through the images and try to add d1.partitions and d1.mbr to all the old legacy images that are missing those files. As I told you we should able to extract the information needed to do this from the *.img files.
An alternative way would be to do the information extraction on every deploy if those files are missing. I don’t really like that idea! Better do it once and update the image with that information I find. What do you think?

[Tom Elliott]

@Sebastian-Roth I’m totally up for it, just have no idea what I’m doing.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Tom-Elliott No worries, I’ll do it! You’ll see…

[adame]

Sorry. Had a long weekend! Hope everyone had a great weekend! I’ll keep an eye on this thread if this is where you’ll update us on how things go. Thanks!

[Sebastian Roth]

@Tom-Elliott I guess I’ve mixed up two different issues in my head here. In my last post I was talking about extracting start sector information from the *.img files but that’s totally not the point of this issue here.
This is about trying to detect the windows boot partition and make this and all the partitions before it fixed size so the windows boot manager is not being moved. I think I need your expert knowledge on this as well. Looking at the current code of putting together the fixed_size list I find this part of the code very strange. What does the for loop below “Setting up any additional fixed parts” actually do???

[Tom Elliott]

@Sebastian-Roth That loop is to ensure non-resizable partitions don’t move around.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Tom-Elliott That’s what I would’ve guessed as well. But I really can’t get my head around this weird check [[ $((ntfscnt + extfscnt)) -gt 1 && $part_number -eq 1 ]]. Isn’t this making the whole loop useless as it only adds something to the fixed list if “part_number == 1”?!?

[Tom Elliott]

It’s backward.

Look at the first part. It already enters the fixed sizes for non-resizable partitions. The second part (the osid) is to ensure at least the first partition is fixed size, in the case there are any resizable partition found.

[Sebastian Roth]

Ok, thanks for explaining. Makes a little more sense now. But I still think the for loop is useless. This would do the exact same thing without any loop:

[[ $((ntfscnt + extfscnt)) -gt 1 ]] && fixed_size_partitions="$fixed_size_partitions:1"

By the way. The current code in trunk is ...="$fixed_partitions:... (missing the _size). Guess this is a bug?!

Do you like the idea of trying to find the BCD file on one of the NTFS partitions and make this and all the ones before fixed size?

[Tom Elliott]

@Sebastian-Roth I totally agree. I think I just had the loop in the case we needed to do as you’re suggesting (all partitions up to a certain point) without directly indicating it. Yes, the fixed_partitions was a mistake on my part.

I’ve removed the first partition out of the loop, but have left the loop in place so I can mount and test the presence of the BCD. It should work, but I will admit it’s completely untested.

[Tom Elliott]

I’ve updated the init’s to include the code to hopefully iterate the partitions during upload and setup our strings of fixed size partitions more properly.

Please test and/or review as necessary and let me know if things are okay.

Of course this will only impact new uploads from this point forward so to really test we need to have an upload task performed. Particularly on a system that the BCD partition is not on the first partition of the disk if possible.

[adame]

I’ll definitely test it. Thanks for all your hard work guys. I’ll let you know when I’m back at work on Monday :). Have a great weekend!

[Sebastian Roth]

@adame Any news. Did you get to test this?