Ghost Solution Suite

I have been unable to solve a problem we are having using Ghost Console 11.02 to push a sysprep'd image to a group of clients.  The mahcines are Dell Optiplex 780's running Win XP Sp 3.  We are using the Universal Packet Driver 2.0 in our clone task, PC-DOS mode, and the "overwrite virtual boot partition" box is selected in the advance settings.  The only arguments we use are -ntexact and -rb in this task. The machines have ghost client installed and receive the image without any issue, however once the task is complete the machines will reboot, go into the virtual partition for about 5 seconds, reboot a second time back into the virtual partition and then stay up at the "ip information prompts looping".  I realize that all I have to do is hit cntrl/c twice and use the ghreboot command to boot the Win XP/Mini setup (which we have done and that works fine).  My question is why is Ghost console not overwriting the virtual partition on reboot?  We have to push this image out to over 300 clients, I hate to think we will have to go to each one to type in ghreboot.  Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Dale Barnes

My question is why is Ghost console not overwriting the virtual partition on reboot?

Because that's what you forced it to do by throwing the -rb switch around when there is no reason to use it. By making Ghost reboot the system instead of going through the normal process and giving the client a chance to report success to the console, you deliberately forced the console to assume that something catastrophic happened during the clone itself.

If you've ever used the console, you'd know that it reboots by itself once Ghost completes, because automating Ghost operations is what it's designed to do. Throwing switches from manual Ghost into console tasks at random even when you know they aren't necessary is not a good idea.

I understand what you are saying, but our office has been using ghost console for years now (with the same configs) in our task without an issue.  It was not until we started using Win XP Sp3 until we started having this problem.  I have not tried the task without the -rb switch so I'll test that out today.  I hope you're correct, but I still wonder why this just started happening now.

Nigel is one of the former developers of Ghost 11.x  so is on first name terms with every nut and bolt in the product. He's usually pretty much on the money with his suggestions, so please let us know if this does not fix your issue.

Things can start happening for a variety of reasons - your image size is most likely bigger than before, bioses are updated, systems run faster, timings change.  Any of these can push a marginal situation "over the edge".

I note you are still using PCDOS. This is rapidly running out of steam when it comes to modern SATA based hardware with big drives, and modern NIC chipsets.

If you have not explored the WinPE route yet, then I would strongly recommend spending a bit of time to get this up and running, as it will save you some hair pulling in the future.

Thanks for the help guys.  That fixed the problem.  First attempt ran like a champ.  I agree about moving to WinPE, but I work on a closed off, very tempermental, AF Weapons system platform thus we have to use a lot of legacy stuff.  For an example, we are NOW upgrading to Win XP from Windows 2000.

So sometimes we have to make things happens the hard way.  Again, thanks for your help!

Dale