imaging

[Swift, Randy]

I am starting to feel the pain that Billy went through with imaging. Earlier in the school year we only reimaged about a dozen Asus netbooks with basically know problem (our students do not need to turn them in at the end of the year). We have now told upperclassmen that if they would like the new image we would put it on for them. The imager is giving us problems. The image process appears to work fine. However, 4 out of 5 machines will not boot beyond post after the final reboot. The cap lock led starts to blink and the system halts. If we try and image them again some will work but most require us to reimage them 3 times before they will boot up correctly. I have downloaded the usbmaker tool and started from scratch to no avail. I did try using clonezilla to create and deploy the image and that works the first time every time. This is with the ASUS 1005ha netbooks. Maybe there is a problem with the imaging tool.

--
Randy Swift
Network Administrator
RSU#52 IT Dept.
21 Matthews Way
Turner, ME 04282
randy...@rsu52.us

[David Trask]

Ugh....OK...Brendan and I are going to look at things.  Hopefully it's simple.  Now that we know it's not isolated to one school...   I have not been able to reproduce this.  How about other folks in other schools?  Anyone else having issues?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "open1to1discussion" group.
To post to this group, send email to open1to1d...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to open1to1discuss...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/open1to1discussion?hl=en.

[Billy Ayotte]

Vindicated! One a side note I think the issue is located in the post image runonce script that sets up the bootloader. We can attempt to reinstall the bootloader from the pendrive via chroot. Try this:

Create the following folders on the pendrive:
   /chroot
   /chroot/dev
   /chroot/proc
   /chroot/sys
   /chroot/pts

Place the following script on the pendrive:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/chroot/
mount --bind /dev /mnt/chroot/dev
mount --bind /sys /mnt/chroot/sys
mount --bind /proc /mnt/chroot/proc
mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/chroot/dev/pts

chroot /mnt/chroot grub-install /dev/sda
chroot /mnt/chroot update-grub
chroot /mnt/chroot update-initramfs -u

dialog --msgbox "     Deploy Complete \n  Press ENTER to Reboot" 60 30
reboot

[David Trask]

Yep!  You've been vindicated  :-)   And you are now recruited as a member of the dev team.  We could use your help.  ;-) 

[Brendan Powers]

Billy, was this the same problem you were having? I thought that it didn't work at all for you.

-----------------------
Brendan Powers
Resara LLC

1.888.357.9195
www.resara.com

[David Trask]

I think he just didn't try imaging the same machine over and over like Randy did.  Persistence pays  ;-)

[Billy Ayotte]

I had issues with deployment initially. This happened when I tried to create the image with the imager. It would take a very long time to create the image (started in the morning and finished by next morning). That image I couldn't deploy. I can (sometimes) deploy the image I create using fsarchiever directly. This is kind of flaky as it can deploy the image correctly but other times it fails. When it does deploy correctly it fails again after the post image script runs. All I see after that is a black screen.

When I call fsarchiever directly via the script it works and deploys the image and since it isn't creating the runonce file I got around the imager bug.

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Brendan Powers <bre...@resara.com> wrote:

[brian mullan]

I know I haven't followed this thread well but with USB I've found you have to be careful about related to which USB "class" the device is.

USB Class 10 devices definitely are not capable of being "read" by a lot of devices especially those older than a year or so.

Some are hit & miss which threw me for a while.    I found things went a lot easier if I knew the maximum "class" I could use with a
particular machine and not exceed that

I my case I was imaging for a cell phone and a Class 10 device just would not work reliably but a class 6 or 4 worked every time.

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Swift, Randy <randy...@rsu52.us> wrote:

[Swift, Randy]

Some more info that may help. When the machine stops at the black screen if I manually force it to shutdown and restart it will boot to a grub menu. It gives me options like boot ubuntu or boot recovery mode and memtests. When I choose either the ubuntu or recovery mode options I get a kernel panic-not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) and everything stops. Not sure if this helps.

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Swift, Randy <randy...@rsu52.us> wrote:

[Brendan Powers]

Do they always get to the first run wizard? Or do they just not boot up after imaging with the USB stick?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "open1to1discussion" group.
To post to this group, send email to open1to1d...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to open1to1discuss...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/open1to1discussion?hl=en.

[Swift, Randy]

They go through wizard. Swap gets created etc... It is after the final reboot that the problem usually occurs.

[Brendan Powers]

Billy, I have a new version of the imager for you to test. It has a much newer kernel, and includes the chroot method for installing the bootloader. A newer kernel may help with the slow imaging problems.

It seems there is still an issue with the post image config tool. I had though I'd fixed that, but apparently not.

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Brendan Powers <bre...@resara.com> wrote:

[Brendan Powers]

Oops, forgot to include instructions...

Download http://www.resara.com/imager.zip and extract it to the syslinux/ directory on your USB stick. It should overwrite the kernel and initrd.img files.

[Billy Ayotte]

I tried the imager patch. I don't even make it to the imager. shortly after the kernel unpacks I get this error repeating:

attempt to access beyond end of device
ram0: rw=0, want=425992, limit=131072
EXT2-fs (ram0): error: ext2_get_inode: unable to read inode block inode=52001, block=212995

[Brendan Powers]

Oh, forgot a file.... I've attached a new syslinux.cfg file. Put in in the syslinux directory on the USB stick.

[Billy Ayotte]

OK, that worked. at least booting to the imager. I'm still getting the weird /dev type stuff during the image creation. I'll let it run tonight to see if it creates an image.