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7 Posts
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399139
June 4th, 2003 13:00
ghost.exe freeze on GX270
I have been happily using Symantec Ghost Corporate for years (currently 7.50335) and floppies mapping network drives, or ghostcasting have worked fine on all PCs (with proper NIC driver) until today! On the Dell GX270 (only integrated NIC), ghost.exe freezes on first gui display, whether run from MS DOS, PC DOS, floppy media or network drive. Symantec's knowledge base only suggests disabling legacy USB support, which did not help us. Reducing the RAM did not help (from 1GB to 256MB).
All this worked fine on the GX260, which has the i845 chipset. The GX270 has the i865, and slightly upgraded Intel Pro/1000 NIC with CSA. The latest DOS driver (3/9/2003) is of course being used. I used an eval copy of PowerQuest DeployCenter, and it created floppies which work fine with the same driver. Modifying one of those floppies to launch ghost.exe instead did not make a difference--ghost still freezes. However, if network drivers are not loaded, ghost.exe runs fine and never freezes.
Any advice would be welcome!
Peter.Anderson
7 Posts
0
June 4th, 2003 13:00
purphse
22 Posts
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June 4th, 2003 13:00
Same here. Good luck.
purphse
22 Posts
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June 4th, 2003 13:00
I have the exact same problem.
I've updated the NIC driver to the latest version (on the boot disk), BIOS revision is the latest, and it's Symantec Ghost 7.5.
Everything was/is working great with the every other Dell model (GX200, GX1, GX150, GX260). This is the first time I've ever encountered this.
p.
Message Edited by purphse on 06-04-2003 09:50 AM
rodaniel
8 Posts
0
June 4th, 2003 14:00
As Peter said, it is certainly a relief to know that others are having this Ghist 7.5 lockup problem. I thought I was going nuts. For us, the problem is two-fold...
Our first batch of GX270 PCs were bought without floppy drives. I don't know if our Dell sales rep pushed that decision or if it's just a bad call on the part of my management, but this is a serious pain!! It's a nasty Catch-22... How do you get a PC onto the network to blow down a large Ghost image if it has no floppy drive. Argh!
Okay, so I borrowed a floppy drive from a GX260 and that gets me past that issue, but once I fire up Ghost 7.5 to begin blowing the image down, it locks. Argh!
So, I thought I'd be crafty and use our FireLite 20gb external USB hard drive instead. (I have an ever-so-handy boot disk that gives me DOS support for this drive and I've used this as a means of loading images on nearly every model of Optiplex with no problems, although, for obvious reasons, it works mucho faster on the newer models that feature USB 2.0.) Long story short... even running from the FireLite, Ghost doesn't lock up, but it does display a General Exception Error message, "36000 error: an internal inconsistency has been detected" and then the program aborted back to the DOS prompt. When I examined the GHOSTERR.TXT file, one line item really jumped out at me:
This makes me think that this problem is not NIC-related.
I'd sure appreciate any insight that anyone else could offer...
Rob O'Daniel
Desktop Mgmt Analyst
Medical Center Hospital
Message Edited by rodaniel on 06-04-2003 10:57 AM
Message Edited by rodaniel on 06-04-2003 11:12 AM
purphse
22 Posts
0
June 4th, 2003 14:00
I'll give that a try. I was pretty sure it was memory related to begin with but I found it strange that EMM386 worked just fine with the GX260 series and the same NIC but not on the GX270.
The only difference being that there is a higher amount of memory available in the GX270 series. This normally is a good thing, but I guess the pendulum can swing both ways.
Hopefully this will be patched in a driver update.
Peter.Anderson
7 Posts
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June 4th, 2003 14:00
droid256
73 Posts
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June 4th, 2003 14:00
Make sure emm386.exe is not loaded on your network boot disk. The Intel driver is not compatible with emm386.
Droid
rodaniel
8 Posts
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June 4th, 2003 15:00
Message Edited by rodaniel on 06-04-2003 11:20 AM
purphse
22 Posts
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June 4th, 2003 15:00
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/8477deaaaafc102288256b1e00704619/06df7b028e074efa08256831007a9b1f?OpenDocument&prod=Symantec%20Ghost&ver=7.5&src=ent&pcode=symghost&dtype=corp&svy=&prev=&miniver=symghost_75
That link describes possible remedies to the 36000 error in Ghost.
purphse
22 Posts
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June 4th, 2003 15:00
[removed]
Sorry, didn't read your edited post above.
Message Edited by purphse on 06-04-2003 11:24 AM
purphse
22 Posts
0
June 4th, 2003 19:00
Results from today:
The only way I can get Ghost to run successfully is by using the -fni switch. This switch forces Ghost to ignore direct IDE access and choose another drive access method instead.
This leads me to believe that it's a drive controller/chipset issue. Not a NIC driver issue.
I've disabled EMM386 and had it enabled. Didn't make any difference. I tried with HyperThreading enabled/disabled, and UDMA turned on/off, OS Install mode on/off, Fast Boot on/off, I changed the shell=command.com /p /e:1024 line in the autoexec file to read 2048 instead.
All to no avail. Only the -fni switch works, but it's completely unusable. The top speed I was able to reach in imaging was 7mb, which is ridiculously slow.
Not sure if anyone else has any success or not, but I'm running out of ideas.
droid256
73 Posts
0
June 4th, 2003 20:00
Does your GX270 have a normal IDE drive, or is it using Serial ATA? Also, where does ghost lockup, when starting, restoring or saving an image?
Thanks,
Droid
rodaniel
8 Posts
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June 4th, 2003 21:00
purphse
22 Posts
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June 4th, 2003 21:00
And the -fni option was used after I disabled EMM386 on the bootdisk.
You might want to try that.
Message Edited by purphse on 06-04-2003 05:04 PM
purphse
22 Posts
0
June 4th, 2003 21:00
It locks-up as soon as Ghost starts. It doesn't even give the intro message box, just the blue screen.