Quick Update, im having a look at the Clonezilla Source but it seems they are only creating one boot entry https://gitlab.com/stevenshiau/clonezilla/blob/v3.37.14/sbin/update-efi-nvram-boot-entry#L630

This is not suitable for my environment because we have 2 different EFI Files on the EFI Partition that need to be added. First is ipxe.efi that points to fog and the other being the windows bootloader. Btw do u see any problem with this approach instead of configuring every machine to network boot ?

I honestly don’t understand why they are creating a copy of the nvram but don’t use it to recreate the exact same boot entrys on the target machine but instead are manually checking the efi partition for efi files (https://gitlab.com/stevenshiau/clonezilla/blob/v3.37.14/sbin/update-efi-nvram-boot-entry#L228) and only use the one that’s found first.

Maybe im overseeing something but I think recreating the NVRAM from the efi-nvram.dat file would be much easier especially when ur cloning to machines of the same type.

Leading to my next question, is there any way to run custom scripts when cloning (to create a nvram copy) ? And how do I distinguish which Image is being deployed to my machine in the post deploy script ?

@Sebastian-Roth I also found that the UEFI firmware implementations does some “magic” and finds the Windows bootloader themselve, like u said

Thanks in advance.

@Quazz Clonezilla creates a efi-nvram.dat from the cloned disk when creating an image. This file contains the output of

efibootmgr -v

and is used to recreate the correct labels for the bootmenu.
My idea would be to maybe implement the https://gitlab.com/stevenshiau/clonezilla/blob/master/sbin/update-efi-nvram-boot-entry logic into FOG, because rewriting that from scratch would be too much work for me atleast.
I will try and see if I can integrate it into the post deploy script but without the efi-nvram.dat it is not complete.

I dont know if integrating Clonezilla Sourcecode into FOG would be legal tho since Clonezilla uses a GPL License and FOG uses MIT.

@Sebastian-Roth

thats what i did, i put that command in the post deploy script. But as i said this isn’t a universal solution. ATM im looking at the Clonezilla implementation but i would need to know were in the FOG Sourcecode the partclone command is build and how i could hook it.

@Sebastian-Roth

I can tell you that running this command in FOS

efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 2 -L “IXPE Hardisk” -l “\EFI\ipxe\bootx64.efi”

solves the problem for me but this isnt a universal approach since disk,partition and Filepath could be different for every scenario.

I have read it is possible to feed partclone custom scripts while imaging but couldn’t find any information on this online. Maybe u have some insight on this and could tell me where in the FOG source code I would have to look for the partclone command and how to insert custom commands.

@Sebastian-Roth All our Client Workstations run with UEFI so for us this is a really important topic. We probably could edit the bootorder after imaging ourselves with the postinstall script and efibootmgr that is included in FOS.

But I dont know how I can differentiate the PC models/Images in my Script and I would have to edit that Script for every new Image if the bootorder for that image/system is different.

So my preferred way would be to replace partclone with clonezilla that supports copying the NVRAM natively. But without knowing why Partclone is used (pros/cons over clonezilla) and how the whole Image Task works that seems quite hard to do by myself, given that Partclone is a core part of the whole FOG architecture.

Hi, I just set up FOG 1.5.7 yesterday and noticed a big disadvantage compared to our current image solution with clonezilla.
FOG’s Partclone does not clone the NVRAM content, which results in machines not knowing how to boot or booting in the wrong order because EFI is not informed about the Partition/Bootloader changes.

Is this the desired behavior? Because this completely kills the advantage of Fog to remote imaga pc’s unattended.

FYI, this is the tool Clonezilla uses to clone the NVRAM:
https://github.com/stevenshiau/clonezilla/blob/master/sbin/update-efi-nvram-boot-entry