Hosts not imaging - HELP

[prestop]

System set up and working according to previous admin – and it does indeed to appear be intact, no error codes, etc., however, when I try to image a computer, partclone doesn’t start.

*client set to PXE boot

• register client in FOG w/MAC and host name
  *create task in FOG and make sure correct image is associated

-start client machine, PXE boots, sees FOG server, TFTP connects
-I watch as FOG runs through its tasks, sends inventory, etc.
-reboots

THEN – client PXE boots into a small FOG GUI menu with some options, and very quickly chooses item 1: reboot to hard disk. When it does, of course there is no OS ( I assume FOG wipes the disk/partitions or at least sets it).
So I reboot and try all the other options but none of them get me to any image load. Quick Image does nothing, reboots like all the others.
So the computers now have no OS or have a disk read error.

I have restarted FOG, jumped through the “Schema is out of date” hoop and restarted MySql and TFTP services as noted in forums. Thought for sure that would do it…but no. Still the same thing, baffling.
Previous admin says he never had an issue and did not prep the machines in any way, he doesn’t know why it doesn’t work.

One thing I did notice on the FOG client listing GUI was the red icon saying “DNS could not resolve host name”, but that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. The clients connect and FOG appears to wipe them. I tried a debug task to one machine but the program says to type FOG at the prompt to continue and the FOG server shouts back an error and says the computer will reboot in one minute – it never does.

One suggestion was to reinstall fog from a file on the server – should not remove settings/images etc.
I don’t have Ubuntu chops and don’t want to ruin the install if there’s just something simple I’m not doing/missing.

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
Thanks again!

[Junkhacker]

@prestop yes, deploy the image with the shutdown checkbox enabled, so the system doesn’t boot, it just images and shuts down. then schedule an image capture with the image now set to resizable. i’m guessing boot, recovery, and system. and btw, if these are “as dell sells them,” make sure you’re correctly licensed

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
Fully deploy and then upload right away - as resizable. Multi-partition? I guess there’s the Dell part, the windows part and then the last - I’m not sure how Dell sells them.

[Junkhacker]

as soon as you have a system with a large enough drive, deploy your image and recapture as resizable. it will then be usable on all of your systems of that model. a resizable image automatically shinks and expands partitions to fit on different size drives and take advantage of all available space.

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
OK everyone - it looks like you are correct. The last order he placed for 14 machines were a different model with a 500GB HDD. My guess is he made his golden from these and that’s what’s in the FOG server. The ones in the old bug-infested tech room, while he may have used them as test devices at some point, are not the ones he put the images on.

One last question: My new machines I will be getting will have 500G or larger so the image should work. What happens to the left over space? I guess I’m not sure exactly what re-sizable means and how partclone works. Any resource suggestions greatly appreciated.

ALSO - MANY MANY THANKS to Junkhacker, Wayne Workman, Sebastion Roth and all others who stayed with me to get this done. This is an awesome program and you are awesome guys! My gratitude always.

Preston

[sudburr]

VirtualBox will PXE boot quite happily with:
Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.18-106667.vbox-extpack

Even if the size of the drive data on the image is an unlikely 230 GiB it would still fit on a system running bare Win7 with VirtualBox and a 250 GB (roughly 232 GiB) dynamically expanding virtual drive because the virtual drive will only be the size of the data plus a few extra bits.

[Junkhacker]

@sudburr he has, and from the sound of it, he doesn’t have any systems with enough drive space (also, there are problems pxe booting a vm that’s not on a dedicated hypervisor)

[sudburr]

My favourite suggestion… have you tried zeroing the destination drive?

You alsop could create a virtual machine with a dynamically expanding 500 GB virtual drive. Image to that then recapture it as single disk resizable.

[Sebastian Roth]

@prestop I think I already told you that I can tell you the disk size if you upload the d1.mbr file to the forum… Or just run fdisk -l /images/MMHOptiplex7020/d1.mbr and post the full output here…

[Junkhacker]

@prestop not in any easy kind of way, not like an image from trunk would.

[prestop]

@Junkhacker does one of these files tell me how big the source drive was?

[Junkhacker]

@prestop oh, right, forgot that we didn’t add the additional files until later and these are from fog 1.2.0.
well, i think it’s obvious what the solution is. you’ll at least temporarily need a bigger drive to recapture this image, or you’re going to have to rebuild this image from scratch. when i say that non-resizable is really strict, i mean exact number of sectors or fewer for destination drive. that means if the source drive was 250Gb and the destination is 249.99GB, it won’t work. there is easily that much variation between drive models of the “same” size.

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
d1.mbr
d1p1.img
d1p2.img
d1p3.img

[Junkhacker]

@prestop if you look in the directory /images/MMHOptiplex7020/ what files do you see?

[prestop]

@Junkhacker
yep…says target partition is too small. I don’t understand that at all.

[prestop]

@Junkhacker Debug is on the /dev/sda2 now. I guess I find out at the next ENTER.

[Junkhacker]

@prestop that’s because of 2 things. partclone is file-system aware, and only copies the data in use, and fog compresses it.
however, a non-resizable image is a snapshot of the drive just as it existed on the source computer. when a resizeable image is created, a few more steps are taken before the image is uploaded, like shrinking the partitions down to the size of the data on the drives (plus some buffer space).

[prestop]

@Junkhacker Doesn’t make sense to me - he didn’t have any different computers. What is confusing is that the image on the server is alot smaller than 250G.

[Junkhacker]

@Junkhacker bare in mind that non-resizable is really strict about size. being smaller by just a tiny amount is enough for it to fail. there aren’t a lot of circumstances where i recommend it over resizeable