Ghost Solution Suite

Hi,

I am trying to simply setup and configure a PXE server that my client machines can network boot to and pull down an image. I do not want to use a disc or usb drive  I need to be able to PXE boot from any of my client machines and pull down an image from a central location.

- here's what i have done so far:

Installed Ghost 2.5 Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 on one Pc HP 8100 Intel i5 as i do not have a sever to use I have  saved the image to this pc. This pc and 8 others are connected to a 16 port hub. All the pc's are identical HP 8100 Intel i5's. The hub is not plugged into the network so all of this is standalone.

We are also fully covered for ghost licenses. We normally ghost our pc's and laptops using a bootable usb harddrive with the image on the usb drive,  but because we have just got 100 new ones in I need a faster way of doing this. If need be I can connect the hub to the network for all the pc's to get an IP from the DHCP or I could install aDHCP on the pc such as tiny DHCP. I do not have access to our DHCP server here.

I have tried by running Ghostcast booting the pc's with a boot disk and selecting multicast but neither the pc or ghost see each other.

Any help would be much appreciated as I have limited experience with ghost and will need to image over 200 pc's and 60 laptop's in the next month. 

Hi,

Check what IP address the client machine receives in the PreOS.

After the client boots into Ghost, Go to Peer to Peer -> TCP/IP -> Slave

Check the IP address in the dialog box.

Is it a valid IP address ??

I dont have an Ip address yet because I have been unable to ghost the pc's using the ghostcast server.  I set the ghostcast server to acept client but none are picking it up.

For PXE to work you need A DHCP server, A TFTP server and Boot Image file.

 

I have used Syslinux to create a boot menu.

Ok I will see If I can get access to our DHCP here Would any one know where I could find step by step instructions on how to set all of this up. I have been looking the past two days but have not found out hot to set everything up to work together.

Found the following articles for setting up a PXE boot,

If you use WinPE as PreOS refer the following article,

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH110129&locale=en_US

If you use PC-DOS as PreOS refer the following article,

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH107441&locale=en_US

Hope this helps !!

Thanks for the links. I followed the first artical exactly 3 times and I am using Tftpd32 for DHCP. I have double checked the steps a number of times.

The client pc is now picking up an IP address. But the TFTP is failing with error.

PXE-T00 unspecified file opening error detected

PXE-e36 Error recived from TFTP server

PXE-M0F exiting Intel Boot image

In the DHCP I selected the option Option 067 Bootfile Name String Value: /boot/pxeboot.n12

But still no luck. I think it might be time to give up and go back to using the bootable usb drive.

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