Ghost Solution Suite

Hey,

So my company has been ghosting Win XP computer images to groups of slightly older machines for a non-profit affiliate. Until now everything has gone somewhat okay, but now I am attempting to do a group of gateway computers (MFATXHRN MDP E-4100) and the error I have run into is something new.  I made sure to add the correct LAN and Chipset drivers to the ghost boot disk I created using the boot wizard (Ghost solution suite 11.5). Now though I am get a video card driver failed to initialize error, which does not make sense to me and I cannot seem to find anyone who can explain it so far. I have never seen any indication that the boot disk added any video card drivers, although I could understand if it was as simple as that. Please let me know the answer.

Thank you 

Do the computers have an onboard video card within the chipset as well as an external card plugged into the computer BUS ?   I am wondering if the chipset drivers are partially enabling an integrated card which is failing to initialise.

Essentially, I would go back and remove the chipset drivers as you only usually need LAN drivers and SATA drivers under WinPE.  Check video bios settings are correct as well.

I will try your suggestion out, but to answer your questions. There is only the onboard video card.

So my video configuration in bios is only:

Primary Video Adapter -PCI (only other option is AGP)

Frame Buffer Size -16MB (other otions are 5MB or 1MB)

Also without the Chipset I get a fatal system error 0xC000021A

Are you adding Vista 32 bit drivers to WinPE?  Since WinPE V2 is based on the Vista kernel, it needs Vista drivers.  If you cannot get Vista drivers for this hardware, check out this article:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/creating-and-using-winpe31-image-gss-251

However none of these previous machines were this type. They were all Dells, Intels and Toshibas.

I can check, but I am almost positive when I set this up that I had grabbed the vista drivers I would need. I have already used similiar boot disks on almost a hundred (no exxageration) devices successfully to this point and never had a issue related to they boot disk before. Except maybe the need to create a new one with another network driver on it.

I have no experience of the Gateway brand, but since you have not had problems with other makes, it does suggest that there is something about this hardware that is causing you the problem.  Do you have any other WinPE boot environments that you could try on this hardware? 

Not really, but possibly good news is that the Vista driver article might work as the Chipset driver I was using is not technically a Vista compatible driver. It is possible that that may be the solution I need.

The motherboard is a Intel Desktop Board and though I have done ghosting with no issues on this type of Motherboard before this model does not have driver support for Vista which could explain the issue

By the way, I was curious about why Symantec would ever decide to use Vista as a platform. Do you know because Vista is not exactly my first choice.

Yes, I do know. When the Ghost 2.5 product was released, Windows 7 was still in development, so the most recent release of WinPE was based on the Vista kernel, which was the most recent at that time.

Since the version 3.0 product was not released several years ago, and the original Ghost development team was disbanded, only incremental patches have been released since that time. Fortunately, the product has now been subject to some serious development and version 3 is due for release in the middle of next month. This will feature a much more up to date release of WinPE based, I believe, on the Windows 8 kernel.

Oohh ... interesting! Makes sense, though I think that they are following the wrong Windows pattern being that its the next OS that should be well done those are their "experimental" operating systems it seemed like. But I digress, I am going to try an use that article on the chipset driver and see if it works.