Dell GX280 and Bart's Boot Disk

Hi,

Can u plz tell me how to include dell gx280 driver in boot disk.

I had tried b55/b44.cab files. But none of them is working.

Plz suggest something.

Thanks,

Anurag

The trick is first finding a driver that works without disabling support for other machines with the same card (as can happen if you have, like I do, a batch of IBMs with Broadcom network card X and a batch of Dell's with Broadcom network card X. Manufacturer's driver might not support the OEM tweaks made to the card, and a Dell driver may support all Dells, but not IBMs, and vice versa...this is the fun part...) and then simply discovering the PnP Vendor and Device IDs and adding them to the proper driver file. Copy the driver cab (use cabarc to create it, if you need to, downloadable from MS's website) to the \lib\ndis path of your Bart's disk, and boot her up.

This is all explained on Bart's webpage, the link is http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/network/. I recommend PCITOOL for discovering IDs, since it dumps every PCI device info to the screen, from a DOS prompt.

All this said and done, I DID find a driver somewhere on the internet that supports every machine I've got that uses the B57xx NIC, including the IBM S51 and Dell GX280. You can download it from: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/atopp/shared/b57.cab The b57.dos file in this driver is a full 6 months newer than any version available on the Dell, IBM, or Braodcom websites, so, use is at your own risk, I guess. I can't take credit for initial creation, but I did add S51 support.

Andrew

Ed,

I did not have to tweak any kind of memory management settings...unless...

I've notcied that the GX280 ghostcasts abnormally slowly compared to other machines, even when connected to the same 100mpbs switch as my ghostcast server. I can push down a roughly 4.5GB image at about 700-800 meg/min with a group of fast machines, (D600, D400, S51, S50, M51, M50, GX270, R51, X40, etc, etc) but toss the GX280 into the mix, and the speed drops to around 250 meg/min. Same goes for the GX280 used alone. So if you tweaked memory settings and managed to bump the speed on the GX280, that's awesome...if it created a problem with the GX270...I don't know what to tell you...

So, if anyone has had any luck speeding up the GX280 using my linked driver (or, Ed, if you're seeing the same slowdowns) can you please post? My Dell rep has been most unhelpful on this matter, promising to look into it, and then just basically letting the whole thing drop.

Thanks,

Andrew

Ed,

I have mine set to auto-negotiate, and it picks 100mbps automatically, but it's probably safe to assume that none of my B57xx equipped machines are going to cough at 100mpbs hard coded, since they're capable of gigabit.

I've worked on server support and workstation support teams at my current company. The Dell reps I dealt with on the server side were awesome, bend over backwards responsive, price competitive, even proactively provided us with indepth tools to help us manage our environment more efficiently. The workstation side seems to be very hands off...considering they fight very hard for our workstation dollar with IBM (and our server business is almost exclusively Dell at this point) I'm surprised.

I'll spend some time in my lab and see what happens with a hardcoded driver. Thanks!

Edit: I tried hardcoding my driver to 100/Half and 100/Full, and both times, I still see slowdowns. As a matter of fact, with the driver set for 100/Full, my switch reports half duplex only...which makes me curious. Ed, are you able to get full duplex?

Andrew

Message Edited by Andrew Topp on 11-18-2004 02:35 PM

Andrew,

Thanks for the info, from what I understand these slowdowns are casued by setting the NIC to auto-negotiate.  I have success in speeding up the image transfer times by editing the .cab files individually to force 100/FULL.  I think if we work together we can resolve this issue though.  I have started building a new disk from scratch and have more info as well as a link to download an image of the disk posted in another forum.

http://beta.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/MSDOS/Q_21207995.html

This is basicly a bart disk, but I use MS dos 6.22 instead of 7 (takes up less room on disk) and I added a few tools and a menu.  I have made some changes, so I'm not sure what will boot under the current config, but I'll be tweaking it later today and will post what I come up with here.

b/t/w  Our Dell rep actually told us that Dell did not support network boot disks.  This includes DOS, or Win PE!  Talk about un-helpfull!

Tracy,

Below is a link to the final driver we're using in production for ModBoot. It supports every B57xx equipped machine I have (IBM S51, IBM M51, D400, D600) except the GX280 at full speed. About a 6-7 minute ghost for a roughly 4GB image.  The GX280 runs much slower, at around 30 minutes for the same image. We've taken to using WinPE to ghost the GX280s, becuase even with the slower boot times to PE, the much faster ghost process using the Windows driver makes it less than the 30 minutes with ModBoot.

Our Dell tech reps have been worthless, telling us that they don't use modboot, and have no suggestions. If I had told my boss I had never used ModBoot before, and so couldn't make him a disk, I wouldn't have a job. I'm really interested in knowing if they've tweaked their hardware for the WIndows environment, but...oh well.

I hope this works for you. Again, if anyone is able to run the GX280 at "full speed" (faster than the roughly 250mb/min I can get) in DOS, please share how you did it!

Andrew

http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/atopp/shared/finalB57.cab

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@Andrew Topp wrote:

The trick is first finding a driver that works without disabling support for other machines with the same card (as can happen if you have, like I do, a batch of IBMs with Broadcom network card X and a batch of Dell's with Broadcom network card X. Manufacturer's driver might not support the OEM tweaks made to the card, and a Dell driver may support all Dells, but not IBMs, and vice versa...this is the fun part...) and then simply discovering the PnP Vendor and Device IDs and adding them to the proper driver file. Copy the driver cab (use cabarc to create it, if you need to, downloadable from MS's website) to the \lib\ndis path of your Bart's disk, and boot her up.

This is all explained on Bart's webpage, the link is http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/network/. I recommend PCITOOL for discovering IDs, since it dumps every PCI device info to the screen, from a DOS prompt.

All this said and done, I DID find a driver somewhere on the internet that supports every machine I've got that uses the B57xx NIC, including the IBM S51 and Dell GX280. You can download it from: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/atopp/shared/b57.cab The b57.dos file in this driver is a full 6 months newer than any version available on the Dell, IBM, or Braodcom websites, so, use is at your own risk, I guess. I can't take credit for initial creation, but I did add S51 support.

Andrew

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Andrew,

Are you going to use a Microsoft PE disk, or are you going to build one using Bart PE?  If you go the Bart PE route, there are a few things you should know about.

The Broadcom driver seems to work well in a DHCP enviroment, however if you use static IP assignments, then the driver takes so long to load that the PE Network Config utility crashes.  You can then restart PENetCfg and update your IP info.

This should be corrected in the next release.

I also use the "Ultimate Boot Disk for Windows" suite of plugins.

Here is a link to the discussion we have going in the 911CD forums.
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8969&hl=ednetman

Ed,

I'm using WinPE2004, and a DHCP environment, so i don't think that will affect me. We're having a dickens of a time making PE run off a ram drive through. We're tyring to do something that Microsoft doesn't seem to support, by hacking up the registry and copying the entire PE CD to a ramdrive, and it's fighting back.

My Microsoft TAM informs me, however, that PE2005 will support running from a ramdrive, allowing you to swap CDs in and out (which is our end goal in copying the PE CD to the ramdrive). Good thing PE2005 isn't available yet.

Andrew