Posts made by NCMikeD

Gentlemen, I have found a bit of a workaround for my issue that I wanted to share with you. Here are the steps I took to get fog to image my Acer Travelmate p245 properly.

1. Remove AF 4k hard drive from Acer P245 and attach to another computer via USB 3.0 cradle.
2. Wipe the drive using EaseUS, removing the gpt and make the drive a logical unallocated drive.
3. Install the hard drive into an Dell Optiplex 330 PC
4. Install windows 7 x64 on hd mounted in optiplex. (Reason for this is because when Win 7 is installed on Acer, the GPT is recreated and an additional sda2 128mb fat 32 partition is created, whereas on the Optiplex, the basic sda1 100mb fat32 and sda2 499gb ntfs partition only partitions are created)
5. After installation completes and Windows installer restarts for first time use, shut down optiplex and remove hard drive.
6. Swap hard drive from optiplex to Acer P245 and complete windows install.
7. Once image is created properly, remove hard drive from Acer P245 and place back into Optiplex 330
8. Upload image from Optiplex 330 machine to FOG as Win 7 Single Disc - Re-sizable image type.
9. Image another Acer P245 with standard GPT partitions and AF 4k and VIOLA!

I do understand that this is not a solution, rather a workaround, and a rather insane one, but for right now it is going to hobble me into the school year until a real solution is created. hopefully some of this information will give insight as to where the disconnect currently is. I am also doing another experiment to upload the Win 7 image as a Windows 8 image, as far as fog knows that is. I will be back with pass fail results soon enough.

This particular acer bios does not have a way to disable UEFI. What is does have is an option to try legacy first then default back to UEFI. I know that these were designed with 8.1 in mind and we had them downgraded to 7 from the factory.

@Wayne-Workman I will look at that article.
@Junkhacker What is the difference between the normal upgrade process to 1.2.0 vs upgrading to trunk? Actually I may be asking that question incorrectly due to a lack of install knowledge with fog, but my sysadmin will certainly understand. Why would you assume upgrading to trunk would help?

@Junkhacker We are running latest stable, 1.2.0

@Wayne-Workman Yes, I have built an image from scratch several times. The current image I am dealing with is from scratch; Windows 7 64 bit. I have tried 32 and 64 bit thinking there might be a difference, but no luck.

To add a bit more to this equation… If I go the RAW image route with fog, the image clones just fine. Any other option results in failure. The trade off to it working is 3.75hrs of download time with the RAW option. I am dealing with two 500gb hard drives, WD and Seagate, both with advanced formatting and 4k drive sectors. The imagine fails going from identical WD to WD, identical Seagate to Seagate, or WD to Seagate/Seagate to WD. The 4k sector info might seem obvious at this point, but those drives are very new tech compared to the 512 drive sector size we are normally using. I have been able to clone the drives just fine using Reflect, but that is not a viable option for deploying the image as quickly as fog can.

Well, I have figured something out today. The laptops which we are using contain one of two 500gb hard disks. One is WD and one is a seagate. Both of which have Advanced Drive Formatting. After doing some research, I am finding out that many cloning tools have issues with the advanced drive formatting. I have just begun the process of dealing with this, so does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this and create and image that can be deployed?

Ok, back to the boards. Since I last posted, we have upgraded our fog server to the most current version with the same results. I have tried to create a Windows 7 x86 image at the request of my system admin to see if there is/was a difference and the answer is still no. Same 0xc0000225 error or missing operating system error. I have checked the bios again and it is set to legacy mode and not UEFI. There are no bios updates for my computer. I have modified the image type to resizable, etc and cannot seem to make a difference or any progress. Any other thoughts or avenues I could explore?

Yes, in fact my System Admin is doing the upgrade as we speak. Is there much of a difference between the two versions of FOG in regards to imaging 64 bit OS’s?

Our current version of Fog is 1.1.2. Every other fog image I use works, however they are all 32bit OS’s. This is the first 64 bit OS I have tried and it is acting like the 100mb partition windows creates for boot purposes simply doesn’t exist. I have removed the hard drive from the computer, and scanned it with another computer to verify that the partitions are present and they certainly are. My bios does not allow for me to make any IDE or AHCI modifications; I have dealt with issues relating to that before with our Optiplex 330’s. This Acer Travelmate is the only computer giving me an issue and unfortunately I have an entire pile of these that need Win 7 x64 images on them.

The bios is not terribly robust on this particular Acer model. I only have two options for boot mode, Legacy and UEFI. I do not have an option for IDE mode. I have tried creating the image with and without sysprep, with and without fogrep and every combination therein, but always with Windows 7 64 bit OS. I don’t use sysprep on any of the other images I deal with, and I would prefer not to use it on this image as well. The only lingering doubt in my mind is my current version of fogprep. Is there a specific version of Fogprep for Win 7 64?

So far I am unable to properly image my Acer Travelmate P245-M laptops using fog. The image is uploaded and downloaded successfully, however upon reboot after imaging, I get the 0xc0000225 error regarding boot failure and missing devices. The repair feature on the Win 7 x64 DVD does not help. I have run fogprep as well as sysprep with and without the generalized option selected when creating the image with the same results. The system is Windows 7 x64, boot is Legacy, and the hardware between machines is identical. I have not had issues imaging any other Windows machines, just these laptops. The bios is not terribly robust, but Legacy is selected properly. If I am missing some information that might help, please let me know and I will provide it ASAP.