Posts made by need2

I would ask that you try the suggested fixes in this thread, and report back on their results.

Hybrid drives are an interesting beast, especially when the hybrid is done via the motherboard. Usually if you want Windows to handle the hybrid solid state storage properly, you have to format it a special way, give it specific flags, and sometimes even label it a specific way, all before installing the driver that handles the hybrid feature. And what you need to do for each of those steps varies by manufacturer.

Now of course FOG will see the drives completely differently since it is running a Linux kernel in the PXE boot. There could be some issues with how FOG is seeing the drives, especially since hybrid drives on laptops typically use unique storage controllers. I would suggest trying the “All Disks, non resizeable” option. Is this image you are making meant to go onto a different system? If so, I would strongly suggest building the image on a more generic build, such as a virtual machine or regular desktop.

Lastly, Ubuntu changed a lot of things in 14.04 and beyond, and those changes are unlike any other Linux distro. As such, there are some things that are still buggy in FOG and Ubuntu 14.04. I would strongly suggest going with a different Linux distro such as Debian, RedHat, or Fedora. If you must stay on your current setup, then I suggest backing things up, then upgrading FOG to the SVN branch (see wiki for How To). There are a lot of improvements in the SVN branch that are being prepared for the next major release of FOG. You may still need to work around an issue or two running FOG on Ubuntu 14.04, but your overall experience should be better.

If upgrading or switching Distros are not options, then we’ll need you to try a few of the troubleshooting steps that Tom listed. There are workarounds for the bugs in Ubuntu 14.04, but we will need a bit more information from you to help point you towards the right fixes.

Two huge factors I’ve found for startup hangs like you’ve described have been bad/old drivers and startup programs that are having issues or are just terribly slow.

And if you want to use the Debian family (Debian, Ubuntu, anything ending in “buntu”), then just get plain, vanilla, not messed with and works just fine Debian.

I have installed FOG on a fresh Debian 8 system just fine using the SVN. If you are having this many issues already with your setup I might recommend wiping the system and installing fresh again, then grabbing FOG from the SVN the first time.

SVN will look a bit odd at first glance since its revision number no longer matches the current software revision that you will receive.

For example (numbers are made up for my time’s sake):
SVN shows rev 3899, installed FOG shows 4591. This is okay and normal now.

@Tom-Elliott It does. At least it did in my environment when I was fighting with it. Getting close to being able to revisit this subject myself. Expect to be migrating our DHCP servers to WinSrv 2012R2 in the next 30 days.

Welcome to both the Fog community and the Corp IT community! Also going to throw in my usual suggestions to go with Hyper-V if you are already using a Windows Server environment, and to go with Debian instead of Ubuntu for server installs.

@Wayne-Workman That is much more elegant than either of my solutions. I doubt you will need my help, but give me a poke if you want me to look at anything with you.

Booting a Windows image over the network will work best with a WDS server that you chain into FOG. I do not have the how-to handy though.

As for using YUMI, good idea. I’ll take a look at my YUMI flash drive and see how it makes the boot file.

Make sure you have your Surface on the latest firmware, or if not the August firmware, at least the July firmware. They’ve done some serious cleanup on the Surface EFI firmware that has made it a bit more network boot friendly.

Fair enough. Are there any other services used in the same server that runs FOG?

What is the computer that is failing to register? Such as Make/Model/NIC?

Also, what sort of box is the server AND client running inside of? I know the server is virtual, but it still can only run as fast as the hardware it is inside of.

There are tools out there that can get Windows Passwords fairly easily out of XP through 7 machines. Use of those tools is legal so long as you are the owner of the systems you are using them on, so that part is on you. I suggest doing a Google for “Trinity Rescue Kit”.

It sounds more like a firmware or manufacturer partition issue rather than a UEFI issue. When you downgraded to 7, did you wipe the drives?

I am running two Hyper-V instances with Debian 8 and have no problems. What is the OS that FOG is installed in (specifically)? What sort of parameters do you have for the Hyper-V instance, specifically around its virtual network adapter?

Also… the GIT repo is at >4201… isn’t the SVN still getting rebuilt from Sourceforge’s general fail?

Yes, it is possible. There are probably a few ways to approach this. What sorts of environments are you comfortable scripting?

Also, what exact version of FOG are you running? The SVN is potentially toxic for some people right now.