Ghost Solution Suite

Hello,

First of all, I would like to apologize for my bad english, I will do my best to be understanded.

I use ghost solution suite to make images of PC's wich are in a factory, I do only one image per year.

But for approximatively 15% of the PC's that I have to do, the task did not start, I do not have any error message, the task stay in "Waiting for clients to connect" status.

The PC is running well, I can connect to it with a remote tool, I can browse the C drive by the network and no error log file is created... Because there is no errors !

Where can I start my investigation ? What can I do as a test ?

Regards.

What version of Ghost?  Are the clients at the same version as the Ghost server/console?

Check the client service is started.

I use Ghost console (Ghost solution suite) version 11.5.1.2266

The clients are installed with my console and there are all on the same version.

Yes, the client service is started.

EDIT:

Once I start the image creation task, the PC freeze and I can not more ping it. I have the same problem with 15 - 20 PC's on a total of ~500 PC's.

Are you using hot imaging or are you booting your target machines to DOS or WinPE ?

I do hot imaging.

Indeed, I have to reduce the impact on the production, so I try to avoid to shutdown the PC's.

If you are using Multicasting, then make sure that IGMP snooping is enabled on your switches. Try a unicast session on one machine as a test to see if that will work. There are many past postings by Nigel Bree, one of the former ghost developers, on the issues involving network configuration, so try searching this forum to see if any of these issues might be present in your environment.

Hello, I do not use multicasting because of the switches deployed in my company don't use multicasting.

So, the task start as a unicasting task automatically.

I will try to find an answer for Nigel Bree.

I cannot find any answer on Nigel Bree post's... :(

If you retry a task on a failed machine, does it always fail?  Or are the failures random in nature?

Are all the PCs the same make and model or are they all different?  Is there any pattern between the machines that fail eg same maker, or same operating system version and service pack?

How much free disk space is on these machines, and have they been defragmented in the last year?

Anything in the event logs?

The tasks fails anyway and sometime the PC freeze sometime not.

Those PC's are Dell Optiplex PC, the model of the PC follow the Dell architecture evolution. All the PC's on the network are patched with the latest Microsoft patches and 95% of those PC can be backuped without problems... The 5% left are in trouble.

There is more than 50% of free disk space and the PC's are not defragmented to avoir to impact the production.

I see nothing wrong in the event log.

Regards.

If the fault is consistent, the best way to proceed would be to take one machine out of service and then go through a process of updating the bios and the drivers to the latest versions and check if this solves the issue.

I have not asked if all the machines are running the same operating system, or whether there is any link between operating system version and the occurrence of the problem.

I cannot think of anything else to try - just to look for any patterns in the affected machines - for example, do they have a different antivirus program, or different policy settings, or different permissions, or different applications installed?