Deployment Solution

Hello all,

I have a batch of HP 8200 Elite SFF boxes here, and like many others I can't get the NIC driver to detect correctly 100% of the time.  I've been through multiple threads here and I've tried all the drivers listed - multiple revisions of the Intel ProSet drivers going back to 15.7, the "official" HP drivers for the 8200 Elite (both Win7 and Vista versions), and even a driver for an HP 8560 laptop.  The laptop driver did work, but only for a few machines - some detect OK, others don't.  Does *anyone* have a working NIC driver for the Intel 82579LM NIC in this model?  Symantec's advice is to either use Linux (which would require rewriting a bunch of scripts), install WinPE 1.6 (I have a copy, but I don't see a way to add it to DS 6.9), or install a different NIC, which is totally unacceptable.  Does anyone have a workable solution for this model?

Thanks,

Dave

Does the 8200 use the Intel 82579LM NIC as well? LOTS of people are having problems with that NIC in this forum. Doesn't sound like anyone has gotten it to work yet. I sure haven't. :(

Yes, it uses the 82579LM NIC.  :(  What's truly bizarre is that we're deploying tons of 8200 Elite UltraSlims and those have no issues, only the Small Form Factors are affected.  From what I can see there is a slight revision in the NIC vendor code between the two, which would make sense.  I found a driver for an HP 8560w laptop that worked, but only for ONE machine.  All the rest are hung at "Restarting DHCP Client Service", which means the NIC drivers didn't install correctly.

On many cases we've seen that  HP/Dell support give out drivers for specific models to use with WinPE. That's if customer asks them from HP/Dell. Have you tried HP support?

Hi Dave,

not sure if you have done this already, but what I did was downloading the driver set for the SFF on the HP web site and that included the Vista drivers (I need always both, x32 and x64), which I injected into our WinPE 2.1 and they worked since on either platform (USDT, SFF and even CMT).

What I don't know is how you maintain your WinPE as I don't use the standard way from Symantec, but manage WinPE myself and inject drivers myself and never used the bootdisk creator for such purposes.

Since I can't attach EXE files and the driver sets are aroudn 30 MB for each (x32/x64), I won't upload them here, but if you drop me a line with an eMail address to where I can send them, I will relay them thru to you.

-BBC

BBC,

Yes, I've tried multiple drivers from HP for the 8200 Elite model and none of them worked consistently.  Despite the machines having identical NIC revisions, some would load the NIC drivers correctly and some would not, which is extremely frustrating.

I finally got it working this morning by building an x64 WinPE 2.1 Altiris boot environment and using the x64 NIC drivers provided by HP for the 8200.  With any luck this will get things going until Intel fixes the issue with the x86 drivers.

Interesting! Have you tried installing both x86 and x64 drivers every time you've added drivers? If 64-bit drivers work but the 32-bit drivers don't, I can envision two scenarios: either you have multiple versions of the x86 driver installed and not the x64 driver, so it finds the correct x64 driver but not the x86, or you have multiple versions of both, but for some unbeknownst to us the x64 driver works and the x86 driver doesn't.

Either way, you've given those of us who haven't gotten this NIC to work yet something to go on. Thank you sir!

No, I've got separate WinPE 32bit and 64bit environments, and only the platform-specific drivers are installed in each one (x86 or x64).  However, if I look at the directory the drivers are added to (c:\Program Files\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\Bootwiz\platforms\Winpe2\x86\Drivers\CUSTOM\Drivers), I only see one instance of the 82579LM driver, in the e1c6032 directory.  We do still have the problem documented on these forums where the 82579LM driver does not display in the driver list, but it does load correctly despite that issue.

We've had much better luck since deploying the 64bit WinPE environment, although I'm not entirely convinced that our issue was driver-related.  It seems the tech deploying those machines had updated the DHCP IP registration with the new machine's info, but then attempted to deploy an image to the new machine while the old one was still powered on, which resulted in an IP address conflict.  Either way it seems that the 64bit driver works more consistently in our case.

That's a worry. I wonder if something "special" is going on with the 8200 Elite, as the 8100 Elite's have the same NIC, we have heaps of them, and have no issue at all. I am just using the Altiris WinPEv2.1 (32-Bit) Boot disk, and have loaded the INF for the card from the Intel "PROWin32_v15.6" (NDIS61 version, of course - becasie WinPE2.1 is Vista). Works a treat on the previous model. My driver is 09/20/2010,v11.8.74.0. I can supply it if you want to give it a shot (PM Me).

MurrayW,

Thanks for your help.  I'm certain that I tried that driver revision while troubleshooting, I went through a few different iterations of the Intel drivers and that driver revision number sounds familiar.  We have not had any issues imaging 8200 Elite models since I clarified our IP registration process with the tech imaging the machines.  I haven't had time to go back and test Win32 WinPE (we're still using WinPE x64 for those machines) but I suspect that it would also work.

Dave

I am using ITMS 7.1 SP1 and am having the same problem.  I have tired to x64 route and no success.  All be have is 8200 Ultra and we cannot get this to go.. I have called Symantec and they stated to to call Intel to get the OEM driver for this NIC. 

Sean

Hallo Guys

It's a bit weird, i have this running on my prod. environment.
Just to be sure, the Network card says that it's "Intel 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection".

If anyone could tell me the location of the WinPE driver i can get my driver for ya.

I beliewe we have taken a pro1000 network driver and importet that, the vendor string matches the one in the DB at least (my device ID is "DEV_1502").

Sadly i can't see the driver in "D:\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Agents\Deployment\Task Handler\DriversDB"...

Kind Regards
Morten Leth