Issue

Zim fails to write information to ZISD/EBD.

The most common issue is that the hard disk does not have enough free space for ZISD/EBD to be written.

This can occur for several different reasons, the most common being;

  • A new hard disk has been installed (all sectors have been preformatted)
  • A hard disk has been erased/wiped (0/1 written to every sector of the disk multiple times)


Solution


WARNING! The following procedure will clear several sectors of the hard disk. Data on the hard disk may be lost. Do NOT perform this procedure in a production environment without first fully testing in a non-production test environment.

The dd command can be execute from the Linux command prompt to make space for ZISD/EBD to be written.

  • If you have access to the native ZENworks Imaging environment (Linux) then TID-2014004: An error occurred writing information to ZISD! (ZENworks Imaging) (ZCM 11.3.0 onwards)  contains steps to integrate the appropriate command into the zim.cfg file.

  • If you do not have access to zim running in the native ZENworks Imaging environment then you will need to boot the machine using a Linux "live" cd or similar.

    NOTE: More information on Linux live CDs is available here: http://www.linux.com/directory/Distributions/livecd.
    • Boot to a Linux environment

    • Once the Linux environment has loaded open a terminal

    • Type fdisk -l to identify the disk name
      # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 53.7 GB, 53687091200 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6527 cylinders, total 104857600 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000b6de3

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048     2314239     1156096   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2   *     2314240   104857599    51271680   83  Linux
       In this case the disk name is highlighted in green and is set to sda

    • Run the following dd command : 
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<disk>  bs=512 seek=34 count=3
       Replacing <disk> with the name of the drive, sda in the case of this example

       The dd command will write zeros to the disk starting at sector 34 for 3 sectors with a block size of 512 bytes.
       This clears any information in these sectors which allows zim to write the ZISD / EBD information.

    • Reboot the machine and PXE boot to the ENGL WinPE 5 imaging environment

    • Restore a project. The project should now restore successfully. Zim will not report any ZISD or EBD write issues.

If you have any problems or questions about the script or steps in this TID  please contact the ENGL support team