GX150 NIC will not image w/ Symantec Ghost

Question

Below was posted about a year ago and I have seen no replies. We have a very large number of GX150's in our company and run into this issue often. Ghost will get to the initial screen and then hang ending with an error. Just like the previous post - we can image 50 of these PC's and (2) or (3) will have this problem. We usually recieve a Tiny RFC error. The only consistant resolution has been to replace the motherboard. The GX150 diags will not show an error either. If this is just a symptom of a failing NIC, then could I get a confirmation from those on the forum? Thank you for help.

Jeff

Hello,

I have 10 gx150s. 9 of them work fine when booting off of my symatec network boot disk.

1 of them does not. The motherboard in this gx150 has been replaced, and there seems to be a difference between the NICs in the replaced motherboard vs the stock one.

When looking at the metal housing for the NIC plug i see this stamped on the new one:

Bel

0812-1X1T-03

0133WM

B

And here is what is stamped on the old nic:

Bel

0812-1X1T-03

0129WM

Thanks,

Andy

Rijko · Answer

hi,

my guess is the ndis driver you use is the problem. Or the slightly different nic.

I would recommend running a program like pciscan to see if you can tell the difference between the nic in the 'good' pc and the one in the 'problem' pc. If they are different it would be logical dell diag finds it as good - the network driver may lock up though.

In my company we use ghost - and the ndis drivers are a pain. Some will not respond, other versions will lock up during a ghost creation, ghost imaging etc. Sometimes i have to try 10-15 older ndis drivers before i find one that always works. Filename for the GX150 is EL90X.DOS.

What helped me out more than once is the "Ultimate TCP/IP Network Bootdisk" ( instructions can be found here ) This *excellent* disk is my first try to ghost a machine. If ghosting works i rip the driver off this floppy for my own use - in your case using the Symantec Ghost Boot Wizard i guess ?

It usually works when i get into ghosting problems.

Hope this helps.

NotarySojac · Answer

We had a similar problem earlier this year with imaging GX-150s where randomly Ghost would get well along its slug-like upload and then say 'disk full' - the imaging server has about 150Gb free. We reevaluated our boot floppies and found that it seemed to depend on how the floppy was made. Bart Lagerweij's Bart'sFloppyDisc (Dell's board won't let me use the acronym for it) works pretty well for us and the TCP/IP NetBoot disc seems good so far (even with the old 1999 3Com 90* driver.) Currently it's blazing along at 18Mb/min upload...     For the past few weeks we've not been able to Ghost GX-150s at all - when we select the remote drive, no folder heirarchy appears and it was slower than molasses in January. I just found the problem - we had begun plugging the GX-150s into my USB KVM and enabling USB EMULATION in the BIOS setup. Bad idea. Once I set USB EMULATION to OFF in the BIOS, suddenly Ghost returned to normal speed and the remote folders reappeared. Magic. Or PC voodoo, whichever you prefer.   Don't know if that will help you, but it's a tidbit to share.     The compact GX-150's onboard NIC still has problems with Ghost. Uploading a 4GB image can take 12 hours or more. There's a document on slow Ghost uploads & 3Com EL90* cards on Symantec's site and it recommends turning full duplex off and links to a utility, but it's way too big for a net boot floppy and we haven't had the settings stick from boot to boot.

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GX150 NIC will not image w/ Symantec Ghost

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