Can I triple boot image with FOG?
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I need Mac 10.11, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 16.04 along with a bootloader like Clover or refind to allow the selection of which OS to load into. There are 100+ machines I need to image with this configuration.
Can Fog do this? Will it allow a bootloader to install, along with image all the partitions for a drive and install onto the machine? Will Fog take care of the MBR, bootloader and allow all this to work together?
Currently only have deploy studio with dual booting.
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Wow, nothing like starting out with a super hard project.
I can’t say I know anyone who has done this, but in theory it should be possible to a certain extent.
FOG as the capability to copy disk images in RAW mode (i.e. sector by sector). In theory if you have a mother (reference, master) computer setup like you needed then fog should be able to clone the disk in non-resizeable raw mode. FOG should make an exact clone of the master system.
Now where you will run into issues is with win10. Unless all computers are exactly alike you will have to put win10 into sysprep mode before you clone the disk. You will probably need a fog post install script to rename the images post image deployment too.
While I say it possible it will be a very complex setup to get there.
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I’ve thought a little bit more about this and I think in today’s age this type if setup if a bit archaic. One way to approach this is through vritualization. I think I would deploy win10 as the host OS (because its the most complex). Then add your virtualization layer (Virtualbox or VMWare) with FOG snapins, then deploy your mac and ubuntu as virtual machines to this system.
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Thank you for the thorough reply!
I wanted to have just Mac on the machines with a virtual Windows and Linux. I work at a school and ran this by the higher ups and they don’t want anything to do with Virtual OS’s because of how “unstable” they can be in a classroom environment.
I think next week I am going to try a master image and see how Fog handles it doing a bit for bit copy to the machines with the 3 distros.
I’ll come back and post my findings. My only concern is how the PXE is going to interact with the Bootloader and MBR.
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@Glob with raw, it won’t affect it at all. It’ll be exactly as you set it up.
Be warned, raw consumes an ungodly amamount of space on the server. A 500GB Drive means a 500GB image, regardless of used space on the image. It also takes an ungodly amount of time to capture and deploy. You definitely should try to multicast if you have many to image.
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Maybe I missed that point but I am just wondering which hardware you are using to run Mac OS, Windows and Linux?? I guess it’s a Mac platform?! You might want to read through this: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/FOG_on_a_MAC
While I am not sure how things are different if you use a different bootloader like clover or refind. Here it says for refind:
Note that netboot is experimental. See the BUILDING.txt file for information on building the necessary binaries.
As well you might want to check out @Tom-S’s https://github.com/FOGProject/mac-boot - haven’t tried this myself as blessing or setting up DHCP/BOOTP/netboot properly always worked for me so far.
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Thank you for all the helpful links! The past week as been setting up the images so that it’s worth the experiments to see if FOG actually works. The machines are all Mac machines of various years but all have the same HDD of 1tb at the moment.
Lots of trial and error ahead since Deploy studio doesn’t seem to play well with Windows 10 and OSX 10.11, let alone a linux partition. Wanted to start using a PXE and keep seeing Fog get mentioned and I seem to like it more than Clonezilla from what I read.
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@Glob There is another speciality in Mac OS X I just remembered. Can you please run
diskutil cs liston the Mac terminal/konsole and post the full output here in the forum?
