Ghost Solution Suite

Using Windows 2003 SP1 server, GSS2
Client machines are opitplex GX280s and Optiplex GX520

I have tried with no success to get machines with broadcom netXtreme 57xx NICs to load NIC support correctly from the virtual partition. I always get a 19913 error (DHCP failure due to the NIC driver seemingly failing). I've tried every variation of the NIC driver, including the universal packet driver.

But I have no problems at all with any of the drivers for the NIC when booting from a ghost boot CD (which includes the GSS2 ghost executable etc). The same machines will also boot and connect correctly when booting from a ghost boot partition (created from a GSS2 console), using the same NIC driver as tried for the virtual partition!

So the oddity is, there's some subtle difference in the files included in the (console-generated) ghost boot partition and the virtual partition, even though they're both using the same DOS NIC templates... The only work-around I've found is to make sure I use the GBP and not overwrite it.. but there shouldn't be any difference!

Any ideas?

No ideas, I've never heard of anything like that before. What would be really interesting would be to get an image of the non-working VP to compare it against the working GBP image.

Although the DOS templates each system uses are the same, the filesystem-building code in VPARTITION.DLL is different from the filesystem-building code in the Ghost Boot Wizard, although they are meant to do almost exactly the same thing. I say "almost" because the VPARTITION code in GSS2 does do something extra - it tries to exit the PROTOCOL.INI file to set up the PCI-bus identifier of the specific instance of the NIC, to work around the madness of multiple identical NICs which you find in server systems.

What I would concentrate on is grabbing the config.sys, autoexec.bat and the PROTOCOL.INI file from each system so we can see if those are different - especially the PROTOCOL.INI - it may well be that the vpartition code is putting some extra data into the PROTOCOL.INI file to deal with multiple network adapters, but it's subtly wrong.

Comparing the two versions:
protocol.ini is identical in virtual partition and boot partition
config.sys is identical in virtual partition and boot partition
autoexec.bat - only significant differences are:
a couple of prompts and echo statements,
loading mouse driver in boot, not in virtual:
if exist mouse.com mouse.com
other difference is setting env variable in boot, not in virtual:
set TZ=GHO-10:00

(boot partition networking works, virtual does not)
wattcp.cfg is present (but empty) in both instances.

the only other thing I can think of is maybe the version of protman or netbind differ??

-David

Console client uses ghost 11.0.0.1502 and PC-DOS

The network template files all come originally from the same place on the server system, so there's no good reason why they would be different - they absolutely should be identical.

I'm coming up short on ideas; really, this is looking like one of those hard cases where we need to try and get some matching hardware here so we can observe this in the lab. This problem is happening with both your GX280s and GX520's, right?

yup..