Posts made by spchristy

@JeremyBrown

I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re driving at but we had a similar problem imaging our HP 705’s. The sysprepped image would install fine and everything worked fine but it wouldn’t allow FOG to rename the host. Here’s how we fixed it:

• In FOG select one of your Host PC’s.
• In the host screen click the Active Directory option near the top of the screen.
• Find the option that says: Name Change/AD Join Forced Reboot? Turn this option on and save the update for your host.

According to the FOG wiki documentation:
Setting this check box will configure the client to enforce the hostname / AD setting regardless of if a user is logged in.

So if enabled, the client will restart the computer to update the hostname even when a user is logged in. If unchecked, the client will wait until no one is using the computer before restarting to
apply the hostname / AD.

If this works for you, you can apply it to all of the hosts at once by using the Groups option. Just open your group, click Active Directory, Turn on the Name Change/AD Join Forced Reboot settings and save.

You can disregard the questions in my previous post. IT’S WORKING!!!

I downgraded refind to version 0.11.0. That was the solution for the HP Elitedesk 705 g4 model.

THANK YOU to anyone on this thread who tried to help me. Particularly @george1421. I really appreciate it!

@george1421 Now that I re-read the page I found online where I got my ./buildipxe.sh idea from I can see I totally misread it. Duh. Thanks for pointing me back in the right direction. No wonder it didn’t help.

Last night I got a little closer. I moved the 0.11.0 version of the refind.efi/refind_x64.efi files in to replace whatever ones come with FOG 1.5.10. When I did this it booted to the refind interface and then stuck there. It also threw an error message about not being able to find the icons. It never got beyond the refind interface but at least I didn’t get stuck on the refind - initializing thing - progress.

Am I correct that I can just download the version of refind that I want, Get the files out of the ISO I downloaded, remove the old refind.efi and refind_x64.efi files, mv the new ones in their place, and then that’s all I have to do? I don’t have to run something to install or register the new files, or anything like that, correct?

In the process of putzing with this last night I managed to wreck my FOG server so I’m going to wipe everything and rebuild it today so I have a fresh start. After I rebuild, would it be best for me to try refind v 0.11.x again since that seems to be the one that everyone talks about as the best choice with the HP computers, or would using the most recent v0.14.x be a better choice?

As for setting the UEFI exit mode to EXIT, I had tried that previously and what it does is it goes to the FOG PXE menu screen, waits for the 3, 2, 1 countdown, exits, and then the FOG PXE screen reloads and it continues to loop like that until I force shutdown.

Thanks again for correcting my misunderstanding on the buildipxe thing and for all of your suggestions. I guess on the positive side, thanks to you, over the last week I’ve learned a lot more about ipxe, refind, and Linux than I knew before…

@george1421 Is there an easy way to tell what version of rEFInd I have installed?

Last night I went the ./buildipxe.sh route assuming that it would install the most recent version (0.14.0.2). My version code went from g47159:

to gc30b7.

I don’t know what version that means I now have, but I do know that it didn’t fix my problem. I’m still stuck at this as soon as it leaves the FOG client screen:

I know that FOG isn’t the problem here. Everything on that side of the equation seems to work fine. For some reason it’s just not finding my UEFI boot when it exits PXE.

@george1421 Thanks for responding so quickly.

Along with the upgraded computers I decided to also rebuild my FOG server on a better computer so I installed FOG version 1.5.10. My understanding is that v1.5.10 uses refind 0.11.0 ? I had tried previous versions of refind that were mentioned on the forum for other HP model computers that had the same problem but none of them worked. At this point I’ve got nothing to lose so I’ll download 0.11.5 and give it a try.

As for the quick restore suggestion, I actually use FOG for quite a bit more than just restoring the OS to it’s “unmessed up” state. For the class I teach FOG has actually been a lifesaver and though it sometimes takes me a long time to get everything tweaked so my imaging works, during the school year it saves me a TON of work. I’ve actually recommended FOG to quite a few other teachers I know that teach hardware repair and networking types of classes.

Here’s some of the ways I use FOG:

• I create my clean Windows Image for what I need (Windows 10 and 11 now, formerly Windows 7, 8, and 10, etc). I have 30 bench PC’s that students work on. So once I have my Windows Image set up exactly how I want it I save a raw version of the image just in case something goes wrong when I provision and then sysprep my base image, or if down the road I need to make changes to my base image. After sysprep I then upload my sysprepped image to FOG. Then I push out the image to all 30 computers at once. On my standalone network all the computers are reimaged and ready to rock within a 35-40 minutes.

• Later in the trimester students upgrade the bench PC’s to Windows 11. After the lab is done, I push out my Windows 11 image so all of the bench PC’s have the exact same image and settings.

• When students do a lab (ie, Windows security configuration, setting up remote desktop, installing drivers, installing peripherals, updating Windows, creating a VM running Ubuntu, etc) by the end of class every bench PC has something different on them. All I do is go to FOG, pick my class group for the image I want to deploy, and bam, 35 minutes later everything is back to a perfect Windows install so problems don’t carry over into other labs. Where this is even more handy is when I sometimes have 2 sections of the class in the same trimester. With FOG, period 1 can do the lab, I pick my group, click deploy, and 35-40 minutes later all of the PC’s are reimaged and I’m ready to go for the other section of class. Without FOG there is no way I could teach 2 sections of the class in the same day.

• I even have numerous FOG images saved for lab tests where I’ve sabotaged things, like in a network lab where I disable the NIC, or assign a static IP address outside of the network class we’re using, and save the messed up image and then students have to use the troubleshooting process I teach them to figure out what’s wrong and fix it. What’s really cool is I created random groups on FOG so students won’t have the same thing to troubleshoot as the person sitting next to them.

• FOG also comes in VERY handy when a student is absent for a lab. I can push out to a bench PC the specific image needed for the lab they need to make up in a matter of minutes.

I’m kind of rambling on here, but seriously, there is no way I could do the things I do in my class if it wasn’t for FOG. The frustration I often have during the summer building my base images when I get different Bench PC’s to work on, is well worth the effort when the school year rolls around.

Thanks for the refind version advice. I’ll give it another shot and let you know how it goes.

I teach a high school computer repair and troubleshooting class using the CISCO IT Essentials curriculum. This upcoming school year we will be using some hand me down HP Elitedesk 705 G4 computers as the Bench PC’s for the labs in this class. To make it easy to manage the OS on each computer, and to make it easy to restore the OS on all of the computers after the students mess them up during labs, I use FOG on a standalone network to PXE boot the computers and install our Windows 10, and now also Windows 11, images.

We’ve been successfully using FOG for the past 3 years but always with Legacy Boot. This is the first year we’re using UEFI and are having trouble getting the HP 705 computers to exit out of PXE boot. At this point we can capture an image from a computer host just fine. We can deploy an image to a host just fine. But no matter what I’ve tried so far I cannot get it to successfully boot to Windows if the boot order is set to PXE boot first and there are no tasks pending.

These PC’s are set up with UEFI so I’ve got our FOG imaging server set up to use rEFInd for our PXE exit option. This successfully gets it to exit PXE but then we get to a screen where it says, “rEFInd - Initializing” and it hangs up at that point.

If I set the UEFI boot order to boot from the m.2 drive first, and PXE second, it boots to Windows fine.
If I set the UEFI boot order to PXE boot first, if I hit f9 to go to the boot menu after POST when I choose the UEFI Windows boot option it boots Windows fine.

My best guess is that for whatever reason it’s not finding the UEFI bootloader on the m.2 drive when exiting PXE.

We’ve updated the firmware to the most recent version. I have it set to legacy boot disabled, secure boot disabled. I had also tried it with Legacy disabled and secure boot enabled and that didn’t work either.

I see from the forums that this appears to be a fairly common problem with HP computers. Does anyone have some suggestions about how to get this to work?

Thanks!

Success!

For the Dell Optiplex 9020 here are the settings that worked:

Exit to Hard Drive Type: GRUB
Exit to Hard Drive Type(EFI): REFIND_EFI

Thank you Sebastian and George for your insights. They were very helpful in pinpointing where the issue was.

@sebastian-roth said in Hung up on black screen:

Just answering this point as George’s is clear on all the rest. This depends on how you configure the startup order (BIOS/UEFI). If it’s set to boot from network it will try to get an IP and bootp information from your DHCP server and then PXE boot into that. If it’s a FOG server and there is no task scheduled for this host it will default to try to boot from the local disk (exit type).

The startup order is set to Onboard NIC, then USB drive, then HDD.

Your explanation is very helpful. Since this runs on a separate stand alone network FOG server is running the show. The only time it’s not, are on those occasional lab days where students need the bench PC’s to have internet access. In that situation I turn off my FOG server, connect my switch to a district network drop, and allow the school district network dhcp to run the show. At all other times these PC’s are segregated from the school district network.

When it’s on, FOG is passing out appropriate IP addresses for the network settings so that much is fine. Based on what you’re saying, and what @george1421 is saying, the problem has to be with the BIOS/UEFI settings on the hosts, and the FOG server exit settings. Again, it seems odd that this worked fine on the previous FOG server I had set up. I guess I’ll have to revive the old server and take a look at what the settings were on the old setup when I get to school tomorrow.

Thanks, both of you, for pointing me in the right direction. I appreciate the help.

@george1421

I left the FOG exit settings at the defaults which is SANBOOT for BIOS and rEFInd for UEFI.

I think they’re set to legacy mode. I’ll need to double check that when I get to work tomorrow though. I messed around with the settings so much I may have those changed. Sounds like setting them to BIOS is probably the least problematic option and may resolve the problem.

What’s odd though, is that they worked perfectly fine with the previous version of FOG I was running with the BIOS/UEFI default settings.

Thanks for helping me narrow this down. I did look into updating the kernel on FOG server so keeping me away from that path is helpful.

@sebastian-roth

I have tried a couple different exit type settings based on what I found on forums but it didn’t seem to make a difference. Any suggestions for what to try with Dell Optiplex 9020MT model?

I need to do a lot more learning in terms of understanding better how FOG actually works. Up to this point my previous set up just simply worked and I didn’t have to dig any deeper than that. This may be a dumb question, but one thing I’m unclear on, does the exit type only come in to play after an image has been deployed/installed? Or would it also be part of the boot process for a computer that is simply booting while connected to my FOG server?

My network is 25 Dell desktops hooked to a switch connected to my FOG setup. They are not connected to any other network. These computers are used to teach a computer repair and troubleshooting class and I use FOG to reimage the computers after students mess them up after software troubleshooting labs.

I recently built a new FOG server using version 1.5.9 on a Ubuntu v20.04 LTS platform. I used the settings for a standalone network.

For some reason when the host computers (Dell Optiplex 9020MT) are connected to the FOG server, again, a standalone network not connected to the internet, they won’t boot to Windows. The computers go through the PXE process and get to the FOG project options screen but when it tries to Boot to HDD it hangs up on a black screen with a flashing line in the top left corner. If I disconnect the host computers from the network, or shut down the FOG server, they boot just fine.

If I deploy an image the image installs just fine and then restarts but again, after it gets to the FOG projects option screen and automatically chooses boot to HDD it hangs up on a black screen.

I don’t recall what version of FOG I was using before I built this updated server (Built from scratch. I used nothing from the old server). When I pull the new server box off my network and put the old one back in everything works fine again.

I know DELL computers tend to be a pain in the butt when imaging but everything worked fine on the previous version of my FOG imaging server. Any suggestions as to what might be causing this?

Thanks.

I’m using FOG 1.5.5 to deploy a sysprepped (with answer file) Windows 10 Pro image to a set of 18 Dell Optiplex 9020 mini towers.

The install works perfectly for 14 of the 18 computers but on 4 of the them it does not complete the final reboot so these computers aren’t getting the device name from FOG.

Any suggestions where to look for the problem? All 18 of these Optiplex 9020’s have the exact same specs and are receiving the same image from FOG.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.