Sorry for the delay on this post. Been testing different things. Thanks for the tips Tom

The problem has changed a bit, the issue is not the windows it self. As Tom suggested, setting the image up with windows 7 makes fog resizing as it should, the problem is fake raid. The computer used is a new HP Z440 (also tested on Z420) and I have 2 x 2Tb disks inside. In bios I’ve using raid as sata mode and I’m setting up a raid 1 in the raid settup (pressing ctrl + i before windows boot). This makes a fake raid handled by the bios. When trying to capture a image of this computer fog is recognizing the disks as 2 deperate disks and not a raid. The raid has 3 partitions. This is my test and results:

First I tried to use image type “single disk - resizable” with partition “everything”. Fog started to capture the computer and everything looked fine. Only 1 disk was backed up with 3 partitions. I assumed this was because fog did recognize the raid, but when trying to deploy the same image to the computer again (I had deleted all data on the hard drives and rebuilt the raid to raid 1) the raid was degraded and only one of the disks contained data. So fog had degraded the raid and written the image to only one disk.

In my second attempt I used as image type “Multiple partition image - all disks” with partiton “everything”. The computer was setup the same way as on my first attempt. This time fog did take a image from both disks, so the image foldes had a d1p1, d1p2, d1p3 d2p1, d2p2 and a d2p3 file. When trying to deploy the image again after cleaning the hard drives and rebuild the raid again fog only deployed the image to one harddive and this harddrive was kicked out of the raid to a non-raid disk. So rebuilding it was not longer an option.

I surfed around and found a way to use partimage to see if this could solve my problem. We have earlier used PING which uses partimage and this tool handled raid very well. I enabled IMG_FORMAT_FLAG_IN_GUI option from FOG Configuration->FOG Settings->General Settings after reading a post in this forum. Now I could choose between partclone and partimage. I used partimage in the image setup and tried to capture a image. But partclone was used to capture the image and not partimage.

So my question will be is there any way to capture and deploy a computer with raid 1 or raid 10 (we are going to use raid 10 in the future)? This has to be done without degrading or destroying the raid.

I’m making a image because we are going to deploy the same server image configuration on a number of computers over a 1-2 year period of time. So I make a default setup of the server then we deploy this image to another server and in 90% of the time we are finished with setting up the server. Only computer names and ip addresses must be added. This is why I must take a image of a computer running server 2008 after syspreped it.

Any ideas on how to get fog to resize the partitions?

Hi,

I’ve captured a image from a computer containing windows server 2008 R2 SP1. I’ve used Windows 7 as a operation system in the image management and as image type I have Single Disk - Resizable and as partitions, everything. The computer has a raid 5 and 3 partitions. Sda1 is 100mb for windows system, sda2 is 100GB and hosts the windows installation and sda3 is 1.8Tb. It looks like FOG is not resizing the partitions as it should. When I’ve tried to capture a windows 7 computer the 100Gb disk witch contains only 15Gb with data is resized to around 16Gb when the partclone is starting. When I try to capture the windows server 2008 computer the resizing is skipped (It looks that way because the resizing takes a lot more time on a windows 7 computer. In the server computer it takes less than 1 second). The problem then is that the disk sda3 which is 1.8Tb and only contains 10 empty folders (So, very little data!!!) takes forever to capture. The partition image also gets to be around 20GB.

Also when deploying a image again containing windows 2008 Server the computer does not recognize the operating system. So when trying to boot a message appear saying “Missing operating system”.

Is there not a way to resize the file system on a server like there is on a windows 7 computer?

I’m using a developer branch downloaded 05.03.2015.

I see your point Wayne. And for 99% of the time we use an image server. But sometimes we need to do an quick imaging of a computer without having a server around and then we need to have a offline method to do the imaging. Have also thought about having a virtual box setup locally on a laptop with a fog server to run in these situations.

Yes I agree with you Junkhacker after the last response from Uncle Frank it seems like a bigger job than expected. Tried to search a bit around this but did not find anything about a conversion or something of images made in fog and then deployed using clonezilla. Do you know anything about this? I tried to just copy the image from fog to clonezilla, but that did not work. Clonezilla has more files in their image folder that fog has and the naming is different.
Sorry for all my questions… But I really need a working solution up and running. All the help are very much appreciated!

Thank you for all helpful tips, it really helps me on the way to accomplish what I need. Uncle Frank, I did what you suggested and ended up with a bootable usb stick and as you said ended up with command line. But it seems like usb controllers are removed from the kernel or the init file. Is this correct? Any suggestions how to add this again?

I will start to edit the files needed to make fog image the computer for the stick, but is it fog.download I must edit? Could someone please describe a bit what files are involved when I want to image a computer? (If someone has already made a description of how rings work and the files involved please someone tip me. I´m really interested in getting t know the system ) I guess the file that involves imaging the computer need a path to where the image is stored, so I will try to implement usb detection and mount that usb stick and make a list if all available images where the user could choose from and then send the path to fog.

Thanks for you replies. Yes I’m also more found of imaging from a server because of the speed and the fact that it is more manageable to have all images stored in one location. But we are going to use this is a businesses environment and because of that we need to have a way to deploy an image from a usb stick as well. It’s not always the computer we are deploying an image to is connected to a network. We are in the process or choosing a image tool to use for the future and I’m really starting to like fog a lot because the functionality and the easiness to do configurations from a web interface and in fact that we can get help from this forum and developers if there are any things we struggling with.

But back to the case. Uncle Frank, could you provide more specific info on how I could make fog work on a usb stick? As of now I’ve tried with a earlier version of fog because of the use of syslinux.cfg file. In the newer versions this is removed and I’m not sure of how to get this to work. But, a image made from a newer version, is it possible to deploy this with a version 0.32 (the version I’ve used)? As I’ve understand it, when choosing something in the startup menu on a client, you actually tell the server what to do at the next reboot? How could I then skip this reboot and go right from choosing a image to start deploying it? (Also some suggestion from tom to get me started would be happily received).

Tom, where can I change the image format? If I do so, do I need a newer version of fog to deploy this image again? And last, since you are using partclone to do the imaging, is it possible to deploy this image with another image tool that also use partclone?

Hi,

I’m trying to deploy an image made from a fog server on a usb stick. I have managed to get the computer to boot and list up the “start page” made by the syslinux.cfg (default) file, but when trying to do a quick image the computer shuts down. I used the guide wound on wiki [url]http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Bootable_Media[/url] but this is very outdated. The files needed are not longer a part of fog so I got the files needed from v0.32. Also the syslinux.cfg are almost a copy of this [url]http://fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Edit_PXE_menu_to_create_sub_menus[/url]. Just removed the last part.

Is there any way to do make a bootable usb stick with fog on it to deploy images made on a fog server? The images has to be stored locally on the stick since the computer is not going to have any network connection while deploying an image. I also want to be able to but a few images in a folder on the usb stick and get to choose the image to deploy.

Another issue around this would be that the images made from the server could have files that are not supported by the fat32 file system because they are too big. Is there any way to split the images files into smaller files with a given maximum size?