Posts made by benc

@sebastian-roth That makes sense. These new machines do also support BIOS, but they default to UEFI. Thank you for giving the path to that config file, I will look there next.

I did make a discovery just now. I thought exit to hard drive type (EFI) in the FOG configuration was set to rEFInd, but it was set to Exit. I changed it to rEFInd_EFI and my new public computers are working properly. They first boot to the network, the FOG menu, then after the timeout it boots straight to Windows. So the new computers using a fresh UEFI image are booting properly.

Now I am looking into the new staff computers, which are using an image that came from a BIOS install. I’m really trying to avoid having to reload Windows and copy data and reinstall programs. If it comes down to it, that’s what I’ll do though. They boot just fine if you bypass the network boot, but now they land on a rEFInd “about” screen where you can press enter and shutdown or restart the machine. Sounds like these computers do have some sort of a legacy BIOS fallback mechanism like you said which is allowing them to boot.

No 2012 DHCP servers. There is a single 2008 DHCP server at the hub site and all DHCP from the 15 branches is forwarded to it. I learned the hard way after much googling that each firmware type requires a different boot file. I’ve been using ipxe.efi for EFI and ipxe.kpxe for BIOS, changing the DHCP option every time I need to switch back and forth. I was not aware that 2012 server could dynamically hand out different boot file names. I will definitely look into that for the future.

I had wondered if there could be issues mixing BIOS images on UEFI machines. Somehow the imaging part has worked fine for me. We are deploying new computers at these libraries, some for public use, and some are replacing old staff machines which are BIOS based. What I’ve been doing is capturing the image from the old BIOS machine, then deploying it to the new UEFI machine. Windows hasn’t complained and everything seems fine except for the rEFInd boot loop. Like I said in my last post, I don’t know much about UEFI and I am assuming the new machines are UEFI based because I had to change the DHCP boot file to make them boot from the network.

I’ve noticed boot options for individual hosts as well as global options in the web interface of FOG. I haven’t messed with any of them. Perhaps I should try changing those options. I’ve seen other posts about editing config files for rEFInd, but I don’t want to get into that level of troubleshooting yet unless I have to. What confuses me is that it worked fine on the first 17 computers (UEFI) I set up, then after capturing images from the old staff computers (BIOS) the network boot loop started happening.

Thank you for the prompt reply. I appreciate your time.

I’m using FOG 1.4.4 and I’ve got the same problem creeping up on several of my FOG installations. I’m in the process of deploying FOG at 15 public libraries. We’re using it to image brand new machines and to back up staff machines.

After installing FOG and getting it configured, the first thing I did was make a master image by installing Windows 10 Pro on one of the new machines, then captured an image with FOG. Deployed it to 17 other new computers and it worked flawlessly. Renamed the computers automatically and everything. At this point, I had all the new machines set with the network as the first boot device. They would boot to the FOG menu, then after the timeout it would boot straight into Windows. No FOG configuration necessary, it just worked. Oh, and these are all UEFI machines.

I think the problem started to show up when I began imaging the non-UEFI staff machines to back them up. Capturing the images seemed to work fine, but at some point after changing the DHCP boot file name (DHCP coming from Windows Server 2008 R2), I started to see this rEFInd thing after the FOG menu would time out. I had never heard of this and never seen it before with the other machines. Now when any machine boots from the network and there is no task scheduled for them, they all boot to rEFInd, where there is a 10 second countdown and it reboots and continues to go through this loop until I prevent it from booting from the network.

It feels like this is an EFI vs BIOS type of issue, but I don’t know much about EFI. I could provide a lot more information but this post is already getting lengthy. Any help is appreciated.