Ghost Solution Suite

I have gone through the instructions to build a boot disc and now have 8 useless discs. 

I have included vista drivers for the sata and NIC which has not helped.

When the disc boots it boots into a screen with a vista background and a command prompt box, the title of the box is x:\windows\system32\cmd.exe-startnet.cmd

From there I cannot do a single thing, I can't type anything and the computer jsut sits there.  I can close the command prompt box but that does nothing as well.

Startnet.cmd is trying to start the network, and if it is hanging for more than a minute at this point, then it suggests to me that an invalid NIC driver is hanging the system.  When adding NIC drivers to Ghost Boot Wizard, you also have to make sure they are selected after you have added them.

So have you left it a while to see if you get an error message or a command prompt? I would allow 5 minutes and if nothing is happening after this time, then you need to invest in rewriteable media or use a USB stick for testing.

My suggestion is that you build a disk without any added drivers and see if it will boot correctly. You can then experiment with candidate drivers to see if they load correctly from the command line.

First of all, the drivers need to be Vista 32 bit (not 64 bit regardless of OS being imaged). The drivers need to be in the form of an INF CAT and SYS file as a minimum with maybe some additional files such as DLLs.

Once WinPE has booted it can access USB sticks so putting the candidate drivers into different folder is the way to go. Then navigate to a driver folder from the command prompt and type

DRVLOAD nameofINFfile.inf

If the driver loads successfully, then you are well on the way. With NIC drivers you can test connection by typing IPCONFIG /release and IPCONFIG /renew to see if an IP address can be obtained.  With SATA drivers, if you can see the local hard disk then this suggests the driver is working.

There are some NIC chipsets that have proved particularly challenging to find the right drivers for, so if you are still having problems, tell us which NIC chipset your target system is using.

For more WinPE build information, you can also reference: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyadventures-winpe

I'd recreate the disk using Auto-detect all device drivers. Do you have any Initial Deployment job that includes some sort of VBScript or XML? If you do make sure you select the packages for those scripts packages when creating the Boot Disk otherwise they won't run....

If you can get to command line check the PECTAgent logs to see if you agent is not crashing. 

Maybe this test routine will help you as well:
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/do-i-have-correct-driver-winpe

If you know than which driver is working you can implement the driver finally to your WinPE packages then.