Andrew Brown wrote: > So I've figured out the issue (finally). Apparently, the optional > grub stage 1.5 is stored in the normally unused space between the mbr > and the start of the first partition. The image I chose to use for my > testing did use this grub stage 1.5 (I think fedora doesn't by default > though), and of course, I wasn't capturing that data in my images (I > only recorded mbr, partition table, and partition contents) > > So I've modified my script to capture three things now. > 1) the first 63 sectors (63 * 512 bytes) of the hard drive. This > includes the mbr and all space before the first partition, which > starts on sector 63 for all machines I've looked at. I'm assuming > this is always the case (is this a valid assumption?) > > 2) The output from sfdisk -d, to capture extended partitions > > 3) A full image of each partition using dd. > > I've tested this and it seems to work perfectly. I've attached the > most recent version of my kickstart file which includes the script. > > The next step at this point, and correct me if I'm wrong, is to get > partimage or some other utility to stand in for dd. > I was taking a look at partimage-ng, which looks like a full rewrite > of partimage that looks promising. It also has built in capability to > fall back to a dd like copy for unknown filesystems. > > Oh, and also: Unless partimage somehow captures that data > automatically, as far as I can tell XCat's imaging functionality has > the same issue. I figure we just hadn't run into it yet because all > the Red Hat based images we have don't use the grub stage 1.5. > > -Andrew Brown > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > cobbler mailing list > [email protected] > https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler >
Excellent. Glad to see this is still going on. I've added this to "/contrib" in Cobbler's git and will go about testing this shortly (as in next thing I do here). Yes, moving to something a bit smarter than dd would be good. If we continue to go down that route, likely we would want to see partimage-ng packaged for fedora as well -- so that we'd be able to host the cloner image up on Fedora's infrastructure so other people wouldn't have to build it (having all things part of Fedora is a requirement). Does anyone else have comments/experience on partimage vs partimage-ng? After I get testing together (assuming it all works), I'll add some instructions to the Wiki of how to use this in conjunction with cobbler commands. I have some spare machines here so I'm interested to see how it all works out. That might warrant making some commands to make that easier, TBD. I think the "newkoan" part of the config is unneccessary and left over from koan's live image, so I'll probably clean that up. I'm guessing we can also probably pare-down the package set some and disable a few extra services, though that's not major. Anyhow, very cool. --Michael _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
