Ghost Solution Suite

On two machines with the same model as the other 15 that finished fine, they continualy receive "Details for: Evaluate deploy anywhere. An error file has been retrieved from the client with additional diagnostic information...

The machines are connection to the console with a PXE boot, the model of the clients are Dell GX260s.

checking the error file only gives me.

Exception caught...

Also, the ghost console is running off a VM.

Anyone? I have a meeting with our CIO to let him know how the project is going...I need to get all the bugs worked out.

Hi Cory,

What was the drive letter for Windows partition when running deploy anywhere? Is it C: or something else?

Krish 

it was part of the console task, but It should had run against the same letter as every other machine did. ...I would have to try it again and see...but I don't rmember it ever telling me what drive it was running against.

Cory,

we had about 90 Dell 260's that when they came from the factory they didnt spend a lot of time worrying about where the IDE cables were plugged in consistently.  We had odd drive letter assignments because of it.  You might check one that is failing against a couple that are working and see how the cables plug in for the HD and CD/whatever to the Motherboard.

Hi Cory,

I was suspecting if you are facing the same issue discussed in the following post.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/gss-25-deploy-anywhere-whp-dc5800

This only happens if the drive letter for Windows partition is something other than C: . Please have a look.

Krish

Krish, the drive letter is indeed C; after the image is pushed...I thought you may had been referring to what was being assigned C form within PE.

Thanks David, I'll check that out, but I thought I remembered the 260s only having one IDE connector for the HDD, and that proprietary ribbon cable thing for the CD-ROM?

David, I just checked and the HDDs are plugged into the same IDE connector as the 260s that are staging correctly.

My bad, we had 270's.  We also have 620's ... maybe my dyslexia is acting up again :D

I am finding more and more 260s that it is doing this on now, any ideas? I am running out of machines to use in place of theses.

Hi Cory,

Only time I have seen this happen when Windows driver is not C:, but it does not mean it cannot happen. In this situation, it goes in to a loop when processing e1q6032.inf file. Could you try changing the driver as described in the  linked thread in my previous post?


Krish

Krish, the steps to follow say to

1. Go to the installed windrivers directory and navigate to the Intel.Pro100+1000\PRO1000\Win32 directory [typically that will be: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Ghost\Template\common\windrivers\Intel.Pro100+1000\PRO1000\Win32 ]
2. open the e1q6032.inf file
3. search for the following sections [NO_DRV] and [NO_DRV.Services]
4. comment out the Needs= line as shown below


I do have the directory mentioned, but I do not have a file named e1q6032.inf.

 Hi Cory,

Driver structure was changed in LU, I believe. Could you search for the driver in Intel.Pro100+1000 folder?

Krish

Krish, i searched the entire hard drive, the file is not on the PC.

It seems my console was out of date (just got live update to work) After a huge 80mb update I now have the driver in question. Before editing it I'm going to see if maybe the liv eupdate its self fixed the problem. EDIT: the liveupdate ha dno effect on the problem, I am now editing the driver, and recompiling the WIM.

One question, I use a PXE boot which means the WIM is in the PXE boot folder....does that WIM need to be replaced with a new one by making a new WIM in the GBW....or are the DA drivers pushed after the WIM connects to the console?

I already refreshed the GBW images by removing, and then adding back a driver.

Cory,

Live update has 3 patches and you have to run MANUALLY all 3 times.

To test if you are up to date open ghost explorer by going to Tools menu and Explorer.  In the "Help -> about" menu for explorer you should see 11.5.0.2165

I edited the driver, recompiled the PXE WIM and DP still fails with the same code.

I am showing 11.5.0.2141, could that be the issue?

Only Ghost Explorer shows that versoin number.  If its not at that level you are not up to date.

Okay, finally got the latest version going with a new WIM, and edited driver. Same problem. I even tried removing the /setos from the WIM as suggested by someone in the other thread.

One thing though the determin active windows locations shows "C:" "C:\\WINNT" is the extra "\" okay?

I wmnated to see if it was a windows 2000 problem on the client, so I pushed XP to it and it still failed with same error code. "Determine Active Windows Location was then "C:","C:\\WINDOWS"

  Hi Cory,

Look at the Readme.txt in Ghost folder to find out if the latest LU is applied. LU3 will update the readme.txt with a list of fixes etc. I don't think we updated DA in LU3, so 2141 should be fine. The extra "\" is probably due to a IO API displaying it as a literal back slash rather than a special character. It should not be the issue. If it did not find the WIndows folder, error message would be different.

I did not realize it is Win2k, in which case it will go in to the loop I was talking about regardless of the drive letter. It was happening when Windows was not C:\Windows. In 2k, it is the case all the time. Could you try to see if the .inf file is still there in WinPE? 

If thats the problem, if you run the comand
           X:\Ghost> ghdplyaw32.exe /target=C:\Winnt /eval

It should run for a long time and fail with the same message.

If that happens, you can see if the .inf file still contains that directive. During WinPE building, it may change the file name of the .inf file so it is not very reliable to look for the file name . You can search it using find. go to X:\WInodws\inf folder and run

X:\WIndows\Inf> Find /i "Needs=No_DRV" *.inf

This will go through all the .inf files and show if it is still there.  Piping this to a text file would be easier (just adding  > test.txt ).

If it is there, delete the file (it is unlikely that this is the driver WinPE is using) and run the deploy anywhere command again and see what happens.

Krish

Okay I will give that a try, but remember, I have tried doing this on a Windows XP image on the same box and it failed the same as the windows 2000 image.

It looks like it is commented out correctly

-----------------------OEM57.inf
;Needs=NO_DRV
;Needs=NO_DRV.Services

Also, the DA always fails very quickly, it never takes more than 5-10 seconds. It fails the same way running the command on both the WIn2k and XP machines.

Something else I noticed, when running the DA command it says "Not using driver database" why is that?

Hi Cory,

Thanks for trying that suggestion and update. I was so sure that it should be the driver, looks like I was wrong :-(

Not using driver database comes when you use /eval switch. This switch runs DA in evaluation mode, where it does not change anything but find out what drivers are missing if there are any.

Do you still get the same message 'exception caught ..' or is it different now? If it is different, could you post the output?

Krish 

No it is still the same message, and it only seems to do it on the GX260 model (so far) and even then it is about 1 out of 3. I cannot see a difference between the ones that work, and the ones that don't. They seem to have the same NIC & Storage drivers.

 Hi Cory,

How much memory do you have in 260 machines? Do you use WInPE or WInPE-512?

Krish

They range from 128 to 512, although on the trouble machines I have tried upgrading them to 512 with the same result. I am using the WinPE (128) image and my image file size is about 110.

Also, I just noticed now when I try to clone GX260s which worked fine before, it asks for the e1000325 driver on post install....would commenting out those lines in e1q6032 of caused this?

 Hi Cory,

You would need at least 256MB to boot to WInPE (though the .wim file is 110, it is uncompressed when boot) so I think probably you would have 256MB. The reason for the previous error (exception) was not enough memory when it indefinitely loops through the changes sections of .inf file. If there is not enough memory to start with, you will get the same error. This could explain why the same error message came, and why it is happening only for some machines. Could you double check that with more memory?

If the 260 uses the same driver, it is possible. If that's the case, please add the driver again without comments and do not select that driver for WinPE. This issue only happens when it is part of WinPE.

By the way, if this is due to the memory, you will be able to revert the changes to .inf file. It is likely that you got hit with both these issues (hence it was difficult to troubleshoot)

Krish

Okay, I double checked that the machines that were failing had 256MB of ram, I then doubled one to 512. It was able to finish the deployanywhere. This leaves me even more confused..

I have another 260 which will not finish even with 512 ram.

Most of our machines have 256MB of ram...if they need 512 or even more this feature will be more frustrating than anything.

I have staged dozens of machines with 256MB of ram with DA....why are some of theses requiring significantly more?

 Hi Cory,

Depending on the configuration and the drivers, and the amount of driver installs needed, this could happen. Do you still get all these issues with 2K? Or do you use different OSs?

By the way, why do you run DA on all machines if they are the same model? Could you create an image of one and use it without DA?

Krish

For this image I am working with it is Windows 2k , but it happens with the XP image I pushed to one of them just to test it. 512MB of ram just seems a bit excessive for imaging a PC, would use a ghost boot partition resolve this issue?

The reason we need DA to work is because while most of the PCs are 260s, a lot of them are 270s, 280s, or even GX50s and 60s, with some of the newer locations having 745s-755s. We need the flexability to just grab one off the shelf and push the image to it. They don't have a lot of ram because they were bought years a go as point of sale terminals....they still fill that function great so there is no need to upgrade them.

 Hi Cory,

Could you find if it fails with low memory machines when there is a perticular driver missing? Though it fails only for some machines of the same model, does it fail with the same image? Or, did you use different images in these situations?

Krish

I tried two different images on the same failing machines with the same result, a windows 2000 image, and a windows XP image.

Where should I start with the drivers?

 Hi Cory,

I think there are 3 variables here,

1.  Model and the configuration of the machine (even though they are the same model, some could have additional cards)
2.  Memory size
3.  Image

If you analyze your failures, could you find any pattern? If you find the same image works for one 260 and not for the other with same amount of memory, could you check if there are additional devices in the machine?

256MB is marginally enough for the operation, so even a slight difference of the system could make it to fail. 

Could you let me know the size of ghdplyaw32.exe file in your system?

Krish

The one the server, in the symantec\Ghost folder is 2,198KB

Krish, I just had a GX260 fail the evaluation with 512MB of ram...no add on cards, and this error message

Unable to create the retarget system object. The system volume specified cannot be retargeted to run on this computer.

 Hi Cory,

This is a different error, it usually comes when you try to retarget a 64bit OS in a 32bit machine. By any chance, this is a image from a 64bit machine? If not, what is the source machine?

Krish

Source was 32 bit OS 745. I had pushed the image out to 4 other machines at the same time that ranged from 620s to 260s. This was actually a 270 not a 260, which makes it the first 270 I have tried.

Seems to be a problem where the Windows partition doesn't clone over correctly, and the Dell Diagnostic partition takes it's place.  I went through the list of drive letters and the only other one which showed anythign was "E" but it gave the message "Drive is corrupt or unreadable."

Then I changed HDDs and staged it again, it worked that time. TO make sure the issue was resolved I restage dit a third time...it failed the same way again.

 Hi Cory,

When you say it failed again in the same way, I presume you got the 'Exception caught' error. Is that correct? Or, did it say cannot fine Windows partition?

Rather than a cloning issue, I think WinPE does not get updated properly after clone. If the machine was restarted, it would probably get the correct data from the drives.

Krish

Hi,

When i launch DeployAnywhere task, an error message appears stopping the task "Unable to connect to the smeutil driver. The handle is invalid"

is there anyone who could help me.

johan

Hi,

Could you check if the smeutil.exe file is in the Ghost folder of the client while in VP? That file is required for DA to work, and I am wondering if it is missing for some reason.

Krish