deploying image from local esternal usb hard drive

[Migration User]

I want to do the imaging from the local external usb hard drive at locations that don't have a good reliable connection to the ds server.

So here's the deal ....
I boot from linuxpe flash drive. type the following at the command prompt to download an the "win7.img" image from the server .....
/mnt/ds/Rdeploy/Linux/rdeployt -raw -md -d2 -f/mnt/rips/win7.img -szf
this works fine ...  the image gets downloaded and the client pc boots up ok no problem.

when I load the win7.img image on to a an external usb drive .... then mount it on to let's say  /mnt/rips3 ....
then try the same command as above except that I change the file option to -f/mnt/rips3/win7.img   ... instead of the -f/mnt/rips/win7.img  (as above that  which points to the image on the server)  .... the result is that the external usb drive containing the image is where the image is getting written to ...
I have tried changing the -d2 option to -d1 or -d3 .. same results ...

I need help. Why does this not work.

I can't understand why downloading the image from a local external usb drive results in writing the image to the local external hard drive while it is written to the proper internal hard drive when the image is downloaded from the server.

help.

Thanks.

 

[ianatkin]

Ah... this is because sometimes Linux will see your USB flash drive as the first drive. And guess what, by default image jobs will always assume you'll be wanting to deploy to that first disk.

A way to resolve this for Linux Automation is to ensure the disk drivers are loaded before the usb drivers. This can be done by unloading the lot, and then loading the drivers back in, in the correct order. This can be achieved by placing the following little script into your startup folder using bootdisk creator. Call it disk_modules.sh,

#!/bin/bash

 

# Unload disk and usb storage modules

echo 'Unloading disk modules...'

rmmod ata_piix 2>/dev/nul

rmmod ahci 2>/dev/nul

rmmod usb_storage 2>/dev/nul

 

# Now reload the modules, disks first.

echo 'Reloading disk modules...'

modprobe ata_piix

modprobe ahci

modprobe usb_storage

Now of course the above is DOS formatted, not Linux formatted so copy and paste this into something like notepad++. Not sure if will work if directly pasted into the bootdisk creator interface with DOS line-breaks.

You'll need to create your USB flash drive root.gz again, but after booting up you should see the text "Unloading Disk Modules" and "Reloading Disk Modules" which shows that the script it executing.