My workaround that has worked so far was to make the source image drive small, 28GB in my case, and it seems to always work now so long as the target drive is bigger, a complication with the last partition not wanting to be any closer to the beginning of the drive as it was on the source disk (i think), but it can be further away with no issues:

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/14571/imaging-windows-10-v2004-with-uefi-gpt-partitions-onto-31gb-or-smaller-drive-and-failing/3

Alrighty, so my work-arounds for this issue were to use a virtual drive of 28GB to make the original image, alternatively you can delete the 4th partition to make imaging completely compatible, but you lose the ability to do an OS reset in Windows.

If you move the partition to where it used to be in v1909, Windows can’t find it and that also loses the ability to reset, so if you have to move it, just delete it i guess…

another alternative if using clonezilla you can image and use gparted to first move the 4th partition to the end of the drive, then resize the 3rd partition, this seems to work fine without losing the option to reset, tested on 2 different machines, a Clevo Laptop and an HP All in One.

Otherwise typically just make sure the drive you are imaging to with FOG is generally larger than the source disk you imaged from and everything should be fine… generally speaking…

@george1421 interesting, Your setup sounds great for support of a large company with varied users.

@george1421 which fat standard are you using? and what other benefits come from using it?

@george1421 I’ll be excited to see your results! if we can just remove / ignore that 4th partition it makes imaging slightly more tedious, but functionally should be the same as before I’d assume.

I also noticed that upgrading older v of Windows 10 on Dells with the new Bios sometimes breaks Windows… X-D which has required me to image the SDD in another machine before v2004 will run on the newer Dells… FYI.

Well one experiment I’ve done with clonezilla seems to work for imaging, I restored the image onto a bigger drive, which ofc leaves all the extra unallocated space after the partitions.

I then move the last partition, telling it to leave 1MiB after

Then resized sda3 to take up the remaining space:

Seems to leave a random 1MiB after sda4, but this still works sometimes and windows loads up without issue, I think it’s because the positioning of sda4 is taken seriously by Linux, but microsoft / windoze has always been lazy with how it uses it’s partitions, especially concerning location, (ofc other than the boot partition) leading me to think the positioning of this partition as George suggested might not be all that important, but I still have to wonder what the hell it’s purpose is… I have seen GParted fail when trying to move this partition to other locations though, specifically when I was trying to manually build a smaller image, the apply steps would fail when manipulating that 4th partition.

I don’t know if this’ll help anyone or anything, but it gives me a path forward on the thumb drive image side of things anyway. Maybe I’ll prep as small a drive as I can get away with then use that and see where it gets me with FOG.

@sudburr Yeah it’s definitely all connected to the same issue pertaining specifically to Win10 v2004. I do wonder about the thinking behind this change… the “why”.

@george1421 Yeah it has been problematic, that last partition also seems to be custom sized by win10 2004 and places it purposely at the end of the drive, almost like it’s written backwards from the end, which gparted doesn’t like. I was trying to manually copy partitions to a smaller drive but gparted habitually leaves 1 MB of unused space after the last partition, which seems to ‘break’? this goofy tacked on partition.

But I’ll test what you posted and see what happens.

The golden image in this case was created on VMware workstation 15.5, but I’ve done a few test installations on a Clevo P157SM-A, the weird thing tho, the new windows v2004 iso will install a v1909 on a lot of older hardware. The new v2004 has been an odd duck of an update insomuch as how it installs.

In reference I had an old AiO that wouldn’t upgrade to 2004 and had this to say about it:

The update from an older v to 2004 also has 2x phases, I assume 1 is to place that partition on the end of the drive.

One thing I did notice, was the VMware Virtual drive is 60GB, so like you said that partition, if attached will require it be stuck somewhere specific on the drive… meaning the 60GB was because the golden image was built on a 60GB? … so basically whatever image I author will always require that size as a minimum to be able to image it properly…

I did make a test build on a virtual 30GB drive, but it failed to image to a 32GB SSD…

So here’s what the Windows 10 v2004 HOME - Non-UEFI partition looks like in GParted:

3 partitions, images and fits snugly on a 28GB HDD.

Then here’s the HOME - UEFI version:

4 partitions, but through FOG requires a 60GB+ HDD.

Other additional info:

I am currently using Virtualbox to pull the FOG image onto the virtual HDD then using PartedMagic + Clonezilla to create the final image. This could be an issue with this new image + FOG + VirtualBox, but it still only affects the UEFI images of v2004.

I will try with larger Virtual Drives and report back the results.

=>

So I was wrong about the UEFI partitions, it doesn’t add a partition to the UEFI, but it does move a 4th partition AFTER the main one. I do know it adds a partition to the non-EFI image tho. Here’s a screenshot from Gparted from a successful image to a 64GB Virtual Drive, I’ll keep testing and see how small the drive can get before it trips over itself:

Notice ~54GB isn’t used of this 64GB drive, suggesting we’d only NEED 12ish, (I know win 10 wouldn’t function in such a small space, but I’m just pointing out the issue is with the imaging, not the size of the HDD itself.)

I’ve found that this works with a virtual HDD of 60GB+ but anything less than 60GB has that error, even a Virtual HDD of 59GB won’t work, suggesting FOG could possibly be incapable of deploying a Win10v2004 UEFI image on any drive smaller than 60GB in size unless some code tinkering is done.