Ghost Solution Suite

I have been trying to push up a new image of an HP Elitebook 2740p using Ghostcast and it will randomly stop at different points with the Application Error 503, Connection timed out with Ghost code 19945. Sometimes it gets all the way to 96% and other times it stops at 25%.

I am using a USB NIC along with a built BartPE disc that we use on lots of other desktop, laptops, etc and never have an issue so it's not the disc, nic, or driver.

I have even tried plugging the laptop straight into our Ghostcast server thus eliminating any network issues but still get the error. The server is not out of disk space either.

We had this problem a couple years ago where this error would just popup out of the blue and gave us a headache for almost a week and then all of a sudden just went away on it's own without us changing anything. Now it's back and I don't have time to wait to see if the problem goes away on it's own again.

We are running Ghost 11.5.1.2266.

I've attached the error log from the client. The server doesn't see any issues until I manually stop the session.

Attachment(s)

GHOSTERR.TXT   22 KB 1 version

Since you have categorically excluded the driver, NIC and BART PE disc, as the combination you are using has been tested and found to work on all your other hardware, the only item left that can possibly be the cause of your problem is the HP Elitebook 2740p or your networking infrastructure. Since you had an unexplained glitch that went away of its own accord previously, this also suggests some sort of infrastructure issue.

On the other hand, if you accept that nothing in your environment can be conclusively excluded, then I would be tempted to suggest you look more closely at the workings of the USB connected NIC as the USB port on the HP Elitebook may not be working to the same standard as your other machines from a timing viewpoint. If this Elitebook is a new machine, does it have a USB3 port as the timings on these can be somewhat different to older ports.

Does the Elitebook have a built in NIC that you could try instead?

Hi EdT,

Yes this is a brand new 2740p tablet. I honestly don't know if it has a USB3 port or not yet, I will check that out today.

Yes the tablet does have a built in NIC but I'd have to find and load the driver onto my PE disc. That's the whole reason I started using the USB NIC was so that I didn't have to keep updating my boot disc everytime they came out with a different NIC.

Thanks for you help so far!

WinPE 3 based on the Windows 7 kernel can be obtained by downloading the Windows 7 WAIK which is free.  The most helpful feature in this release of WinPE is that it follows the Win 7 capability of being able to recurse through a complex folder of drivers to find the right one.  I am not familiar with the details of the Bart PE implementation, but I believe it is a hand cranked version of WinPE that uses the operating system fileset, but it seems to me that if BartPE has been updated to use Win 7 files, it may be able to offer the same capabilities.

My article on the Vista version of WinPE, Adventures with WinPE Symantec Connect, covers the creation of various boot solutions including both USB sticks and USB drives. This version of WinPE supports dynamic loading of drivers from the command line, so it would not take much work to copy the Vista32 driver for the NIC on your new machine onto a USB boot device, and then mount the driver from the command line for your current session. This could be accomplished by using batch files from a menu allowing you to add different drivers to your bootable device as and when required, if you encounter issues with your USB connected NIC.

The version of GSS you have also supports the creation of WinPE V2 boot media and driver addition is handled by the GUI, so again it is not a hugely time consuming process to add a new driver.

Update;

I tried the same BartPE CD and USB NIC on another machine and also got the same error message. I was however able to pull out an older USB NIC to try and that one worked fine. It ran a lot slower because it was only a 10/100 versus the newer Gigabit one that I've been using. So then I decided to try the older slower USB NIC on the 2740p tablet figuring that if it takes longer no big deal. But for some reason I cannot get the driver to load correctly onto the 2740p for the older NIC even though it worked fine on the other machine.

So I made a new boot disc from GSS and added the driver for the built in NIC on the laptop. Tried running Ghostcast to push up the image and BAM, same error message.

This is getting very frustrating....

Can we assume you are using the WinPE boot disk from GSS ?  Did you add the VISTA 32 bit driver?

What NIC chipset is the Elitebook using?  Are there any NIC configuration settings in the BIOS ?

Yes I created the WinPE boot disc from GSS. I did not add Vista drivers because this laptop is actually using Windows XP Tablet edition so that's the driver I installed.

The built in NIC is an Intel 82577LM.

There are some basic BIOS NIC settings;

Embedded WLAN Device (Enabled)

Network Interface Controller (LAN) (Enabled)

LAN/WLAN Switching (Disabled)

You MUST use the Vista drivers. You are booting WinPE V2, which is based on the Vista 32 bit kernel, so it needs Vista 32 bit drivers.

Remember you are just imaging a hard disk - the actually operating system on there is immaterial as it is not running at the time of imaging, so it could be Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 or even PCDOS 1.0 for that matter.  Therefore any drivers you add to your WinPE boot system MUST be appropriate for the version of Windows that WinPE is based on.

Sorry, I forgot all about that. It's been a long time since I've used GSS to create a boot disc. My BartPE disc and usb nic have been working so well for years that I haven't bothered with GSS.

I will update the GSS Disc with Vista drivers and see how that goes.

Thanks for you help.

Hi EdT,

Sorry to report that the Vista driver did not help resolve this 19945 error message, I am still getting it.

Did you test this with a direct connection to the Ghost server?  It would be useful to also exclude the networking infrastructure.

Also, have you tried another Elitebook (if you have one) to exclude the possibility of a hardware issue?

Finally, is the machine running the latest BIOS, or are there any similar issues reported for this model elsewhere? 

SUCCESS!

I tried updating the BIOS and that did not help.

I was about to connect the laptop directly into the Ghost server when we ran into problems getting our KVM switch & console to connect to the server. We ended up having to reboot the server and it never occurred to me that this server had been up and running for a very long time. I don't remember the last time it had been power cycled.

So after rebooting the server, I decided to try pushing the image up over the network one more time just to see if rebooting made any difference. This time it went 100% but got a strange message at the end. It said that the image size was smaller than the reported size and asked if that was "OK" or to "Ignore". I just hit OK and the session finished.

I am in the process of trying to pull down that new image onto another 2740P tablet now to make sure the image is OK.

So it appears that the problem was something on the server itself even though it never gave any errors on the server and only on the client.

Hopefully that fixed it and I appreciate all your help EdT!

Just like to report that the problem must have been something w/ the server. Because now I am able to push up an image using my BartPE and USB NIC without a problem again.

Wish I would have thought about just rebooting the server from the get go, would have saved a lot of time and trouble...

Wish I had thought to suggest it!!

Was the server rebooted last time you had the problem when it magically cured itself?

It's very possible but like I said it has been a couple years since it last happened so it's very possible the server was rebooted and we just didn't put two and two together.