Ghost Solution Suite

One of the server platforms I manage, some HP DL360 G6's, are very slow when restoring an image using Ghost Cast Server.  It only takes about 15 minutes to create an image, but takes up to 2 hours to restore an image using the same process.  None of my other server platforms have this issue.  All these DL360's have this issue and they are on 2 different Ghost Servers.  Any ideas?

Hello,

Which pre-os and version of ghost are you using?.

we got some new machines in a couple months ago that when in Windows proper would be in 1GB network mode, but in PE only negotiated to 10Mbps.  We had to get a new driver for the PE environment.  Remember, Vista 32bit for the Ghost PE

Terry Bu makes a valid point - if the NIC is only running at 10 Mbps or some other "slow" permutation under WinPE, then the restore is going to take a lot longer. Sometimes the connection speed can be checked easily by looking at the colour of the connection light on the switch.

The default speed for the NIC is often set in the INF file which is part of the driver fileset. You can open the INF file and have a look at the definitions therein. There is usually a section where the different NIC speeds are listed as description strings, and another section where a default setting points to one of these. The default may point to an "Auto" setting, but if you find that the connection speed is incorrect you could try editing the INF file to explicitly default to the lan speed you want to connect at.

Drivers can be loaded dynamically from the WinPE command prompt after WinPE has booted, which means you can experiment with different INF file configurations without having to rebuild the WinPE image each time. If you make a bootable USB key, or point your bootable WinPE media at a USB key which had the INF SYS and CAT files on it, then all you need to do at the command prompt is type

DRVLOAD <full path and filename of driver INF file>

Wouldn't a nic driver issue affect image creation and image restoral?  My problem is only with image restores.

if you were using the same driver in the up and down process.  We used a boot CD to capture the image, but used Ghost Console to restore it.  The boot CD was XP (is now Win7 for us), but the Console is always Vista.

I am using my WinPE boot CD for both creating and restoring images.

Have you checked that the machines are connecting at the same LAN speed for both image creation and image restore?  I know this was raised earlier but you've not explicitly mentioned whether this has been checked. The ratio of 15 minutes to 2 hours, is 8:1 which is near enough to 10:1 to make me wonder if the connection speed for restore is somehow defaulting to 10Mbps.

The Cisco switch this system is connected to doesn't have different colors for different connection speeds.  How else can I determine connection speed for this system when using the Boot CD?

Does the Cisco switch lack any utilities that can report on connection speeds and half/full duplex connections?  That would be my first suggestion.

Alternatively, if you have a simple switch from Netgear or whoever, that does show connection speed by colour of connect light, then why not put in between the machine and the Cisco switch and see what it reports.

Finally, you can run WMI queries from WinPE, so perhaps you can locate some code online which can retrieve the connection speed that way.

I'm wondering if the NIC driver it's picking is not the perfect driver.  This is an HP DL360 G6 server that has a HP NC382i DP Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter.  I saw somewhere on the web that this setup may  need more than one driver, and the HP driver package for Windows 2003 (No Vista drivers available) contains VBD driver version 6.0.22.0, NDIS 5.2 driver version 6.0.32.0, iSCSI offload driver version 6.0.12.0, diagnostic driver version 6.0.11.0 and crash dump driver version 6.0.2.0.  The device Instance ID shows PCI_163914E and SUBSYS_7055103C if that helps.