It's likely the case that since your SBS system has a lot of network services installed on it, one of them may have claimed the network ports used by the network services the console uses, and our service can't start until those are available (this is incredibly rare, but I can recall one other time it has been reported). The product MSI installer isn't aware of this possibility, so it doesn't try and trigger a machine reboot, but generally that's what you need.

The "Symantec Ghost Configuration Server" service wants to have UDP and TCP ports 1345 and 1347 free; you can see which processes have which ports open by using the command "netstat -a -o" (to see the processed by process ID number) or "netstat -a -b" to see the executable names, and one of the longer-running servers on the machine is probably squatting on those. Either rebooting the server, or restarting the one particular service using that particular port should resolve this; the Configuration Server service is quite lightweight and will claim the network resources it needs quite quickly at boot time so nothing else can get in ahead of it, so this should be a one-time thing at installation. Once that service process is able to listen to the network port the clients are trying to contact it on, then they should in principle start to show up in the console.

Thanks Nigel - I didn't even need to check the ports, a reboot sorted the problem as you suggested it may.

Where a reboot reboot resolves many issues on a PC (rather than checking all the services), it's something of a luxury on an SBS server, keeping the network/Internet down for 10 minutes.

I now have the licences and basic support contract but no media. Is this downloadable, as I would like to take local images of the PCs?

If not what is the best method of doing this from the console?

Thanks,

Mike

Information on using most of the components of Ghost outside the console is covered in the "Implementation Guide" manual, which covers quite a lot of ground about the various individual tool components included in the suite (oddly, there isn't a shortcut to the guide PDF installed directly, and the easiest way to launch that PDF is from the Help menu in the console - it's probably a good idea to create a direct desktop shortcut to "C:\Program Files\Symantec\ghost\Ghost_imp_guide.pdf" because it's a very big document that you will probably want to refer to frequently as you start out).

For standalone manual cloning, you want to look first in Section 3 of the Implementation Guide, which covers the Ghost Boot Wizard; that tool is what you use to create your own boot media in order to be able to run Ghost locally by hand (or by creating your own boot scripts to use Ghost's command line), and later sections of the guide describe that process in more detail.

Doing this through the console is also possible; when you define the locations for an image for a console task to use, you can either specify a location on the server, or else a path that will be used on the client machines themselves. Having defined that location, you can then create tasks which refer to that location, and if the location is specified as client-relative then all the clients will store their images locally instead (inside the "Help Topics" helpfile launched from the console's Help menu, this is covered under "Creating Tasks" "Creating an image of a computer" "Creating image definitions").

Thanks Nigel. I've downloaded the full version and patched it three times. All going well and I've created images and executed the tasks on four of the five PCs. The fifth keeps failing on the step to Virtual Partition. I've tried the using the " -fni -noide" condition as this is a SATA system, but the error msg is:

Details for: To Virtual Partition
Drivers could not be found in the PreOS for the following devices:

Manufacturer: "Nvidia", Description: "Nvidia Network Bus Enumerator", PCI Vendor: 0x010de, PCI Device 0x7dc, PCI Subsystems: 0x366c1462

I've downloaded Vista and XP drivers and ran a task to DeployAnywhere adding the drivers and then the Boot Wizard, but still get the same error.

You'll need to be more specific about which drivers you downloaded and added with the Ghost Boot Wizard. Specifically, 10DE:07DC is the nVidia MCP73 chip and the driver for it is the Ethernet driver included in the current nForce platform driver set (I happen to have the nForceVista driver package 15.23 here and that PCI ID is listed in the Ethernet driver's nvfd6032.inf file).

The error message you quoted specifically refers to the preOS, which means the Windows Vista boot system. So you need to have done these things:

 - specifically added the Vista nForce Ethernet drivers to the driver library in the Boot Wizard, and
 - in addition, set them to be included in the specific WinPE environment you selected for the client in the console (remember there are two, a 256Mb version and a 512mb version), by ticking the tickbox next to the driver when you edit the WinPE or WinPE-512 image, causing the .WIM file to be rebuilt

You should also ensure that you have the same variant (WinPE or WinPE-512 that you edited in the Boot Wizard) selected as the preOS for that client in the console.

I downloaded the driver package 15.23 which included the nvfd6032.inf file.

It wouldn't allow me to add it through the boot wizard so I created a task and included it through DeployAnywhere driver additions. I then ran the boot wizard ticking the include DeployAnywhere box to synchronise the drivers. I checked it had been added and ticked it. I'm using WinPE-512, but I've added it to WinPE as well, but I am still getting exactly the same error message.

I need to correct last post, since adding drivers to Win PE it's failing because it's timing out waiting for the client to connect.

At this point we're stuck. The console client in Windows PE requires the correct network driver to be installed in order to contact the server during the task, and the driver I suggested definitely should be the right one to use for this - I have added it to and rebuilt Windows PE to include it successfully using the Ghost Boot Wizard.


When you say "It wouldn't allow me to add it through the boot wizard" it's not clear what you mean. I've added this exact driver by unpacking the nVidia driver package and then browsing to the "Ethernet" driver directory which contains the specific driver, at which point it can be imported and added to Windows PE.

Probably you are best off contacting Technical Suppport for your region for more hands-on assistance to walk through what is happening in your environment.