Ghost Solution Suite

Just performed a fresh install of GSS 3.0 followed by HF1 on a new machine trying to migrate away from GSS 2.5.1.  My lab already has Windows 7 64-bit installed and running perfectly.  I've successfully installed the Agent and it is reporting to my GSS console correctly.  I've recently updated one of my machines and need to push this image out to the rest of the machines.  I don't have PXE setup or available so I thought I would use the Automation Partition, but have had no success.

I've successfully installed the Automation Partition to the "source" workstation and it boots into Automation successfully, but then hangs trying to get an IP address.  The machine throws "Validating network connection (criteria = -169.254)..." followed by a loop of "Restarting DHCP client service: retry 1-19".  Followed with "Could not acquire IP address".

The process continues and eventually the agent loads but displays "Connect failed".

If I bring up one of the minimized command windows and run a "ipconfig /all" the network adapter does display and shows an APIPA address.  In previous versions of GSS, if you run "ipconfig /all" and the driver wasn't loaded the NIC wouldn't display at all let alone an APIPA address.  If I try to run an "ipconfig /release" followed by "ipconfig /renew" the renew command will just hang or I'll receive a message that "The Interface is Unknown".

Thinking there was something wrong with the Automation Partition, or the way I created it, I went through to try to create a bootable USB media using the instructions I found here: http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/creating-boot-media-legacy-ghostcasting-ghost-solution-suite-3.  Unfortunately, when I connected the drive to a workstation I receive the same results.

I've been fighting this all day now and am at my wits end.  I've read multiple articles on this that seem to indicate a driver issue.  Most are related to VMware so I downloaded the entire Intel driver collection, the target NIC is an Intel i217-LM, and added it to the DeployAnywhere Driver Database.  Still no love.  Can someone point me in the right direction to hopefully get this resolved?

Thanks!

Try using the search engine on i217-LM in case there are any past thread relating.

The inability to release/renew the IP address suggests the network driver has a problem. Ignore whatever operating system is, or is not, installed on the hard disk of the target machine. Any NIC driver you load has to be compatible with the version of WinPE you are using in the automation partition boot. Ghost 3 uses WinPE 5, but as well as using a Win7/8 driver, you also need to ensure that if you are booting WinPE 32 bit you add the 32 bit driver, and use the 64 bit driver for WinPE 64.

You can dynamically load drivers from the WinPE command line using DRVLOAD. This gives you a quck and simple way to check if drivers load OK from external media such as a USB stick