Symantec Ghost Problem

[Cyron]

Hello again friends,

I have 50 systems that need to be cloned. They have the same
hardware so I think that will simply things a lot. To assist me, I
have purchased licenses for Symantec Ghost 8.2 and am also using
Microsoft Remote Installation Services on Windows 2003 to provide PXE
support.

In my initial tests things went very well -- I was able to boot a
blank system with PXE, download the ghost.exe, upload an image to the
GhostcastServer and download it onto another system. Unfortunately
today I attempted to leave one of my NICs connected to one LAN while
using the other NIC to access the LAN I am using for Ghost cloning.
RIS continued to work flawlessly but Ghost would abort the transfer of
the image at about 1 to 3% into the download.

Since then I've discovered in researching the problem that Ghost
doesn't support multiple NIC machines...so I'm no longer trying to use
both at once. I've reinstalled Ghostcast server, NIC drivers, etc...
its still not working. It was working so beautifully before for many
days.

Anyone have suggestions?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Cyron]

Problem solved!

For anyone else who may stumble across this problem in the future:

A variety of people have reported this problem on various systems.
For some people the cause was cloning a system which used both IDE and
SATA drives; Others had IRQ conflicts with their NIC and video cards;
There were also problems if your network card was not correctly
adjusting its link speed. My problem turned out to be in the network
driver provided by Broadcom. I downloaded their latest NDIS2 driver,
created a new RIS boot disk using the new driver files and voila -- it
worked at the desired speed of ~800meg/min.

Using the -noide parameter with Ghost also solved the problem with
the old drivers -- but I was only getting a transfer rate of ~ 133
Meg/Minute.

Good luck!

 

[Guest]

Hello Cyron.

I am glad you were able to solve your Ghost problem.
Would you be able to tell me the exact procedure you used in creating and
pushing the image file using RIS?
I am trying to configure Ghost 8.0 to use RIS to do just that and it seems
you were able to get it working nicely.
Thanks in advance for any info you can tell me

Jeff.

 

[Cyron]

Jeff.

Hello Cyron.

I am glad you were able to solve your Ghost problem.
Would you be able to tell me the exact procedure you used in creating and
pushing the image file using RIS?
I am trying to configure Ghost 8.0 to use RIS to do just that and it seems
you were able to get it working nicely.
Thanks in advance for any info you can tell me

Hello Jeff,

Sorry I didn't see your post earlier -- hopefully this information
will be of some use to you if you haven't already found a solution to
your problem. For me, setting up RIS was the most intriguing part of
the experience. There are some prerequisites that must be completed
before installing RIS. First you need to use a Server version of
Windows. I used Windows 2003 Server. Next, you need to install and
configure the DHCP Server (so you can assign IP addresses to clients
are connecting via RIS), DNS Server and Active Directory (Domain
Controller) After these things are installed you can then install RIS.
After RIS is installed it will allow you to add bootable images (such
as OS images, etc... I skipped this part)

Once you have reached this point, you should now install Symantec
Ghost Console on the RIS server. I used Symantec Ghost Solutions Suite
1.0 (I believe I recall reading that there isn't a whole lot of
differences between this version and 8.0). It's important to install
Ghost after RIS is installed otherwise it won't detect its presense in
the next step.

Go into the Ghost Console and select Create Boot Disk. You're now
presented with various boot disk options -- and if Ghost detects RIS
has been installed you can select RIS install from the list. Now you
can customize the settings that the clients will see on the RIS menu
when they boot, specify which ndis driver to use for the ethernet card
etc... After your'e done an entry is automatically entered into your
RIS settings.

Now just fire up a client system that is connected to the same
network (mine were Dell PowerEdge servers that were completely blank),
and when they boot select the PXE boot option. If all goes well you
will see a prompt to boot from PXE. This in turn will launch to the
Wizard for install. Note: Microsofts Wizard will have some warning
saying you are going to lose everything on your hard disk, blah blah
blah.. .Obviously it thinks you are going to be installing an OS, but
really you're just going to run the Ghost program so it won't hurt
anything unless you actually do want to Ghost over your drive.
Anyways, once you're in Ghost, you just select the drive you want to
image, tell teh ghost server youre ready and away you go. Downloading
an image you have taken from another machine is just as simple.

Anyways if you have questions drop a line. Good luck! It's a great too