Ghost Solution Suite

Hello,

Im having a problem when i restore a image over a gigbit with a crossover cable.. I can make the image and it takes about 2 1/2 hours for 178GB but when i try to restore it to another machine it says it is going to take 319 Hrs. I am having to use the Universal driver. I tried the marvel gigabit driver and it freezes the system i am useing when it tries to boot using ms-dos.i have not tried it with pc-dos yet.  i am useing a Acer  AST 160 / ASE 360 ( same motherboard ) both machines are using the same motherboard. when i just use the console it is going to take 2 hrs. but i want to be able to deploy it over the giga network since i have 16 machines with the same image. please help. i think it is something with the driver i am using but i can not find the right one for this board.

I am restoring the images to multiple machines using ghost cast. The client machines are booting from a boot disk made in the ghost booting wizard, and the Server is running windows xp mce. I am using the marvell driver from the yukon site, I tried today to use a crossover cable to one client and the image creation took 2 1/2 hrs for 180GB and to restore it was going to take 319hrs over a 1Gb connection. I then tried the same driver over a 10 / 100 lan with switch took 6 1/2 hrs to create and 6 1/2 hrs to restore. I am now assumeing it is either the driver for Gb or my crossover cable. but the crossover cable was fine with the image creation. please advise

The only driver i can get to work without frezzing at boot is the universal driver. I am going to try a Giga switch today. Also my understanding is that peer to peer i can only image one at a time is this true? or can it act like multicast? and i was trying the marvell yukon driver on a bootable thumb drive made in the boot wizard and it would boot but freeze. I know this thumb drive and PC supports bootingfrom usb since the same drive i can make bootable and run dos commands from it. i had to burn a iso to get it to boot all the way into ghost.. Please advise.

Message Edited by Krish Jayaratne on 05-21-200707:54 PM

i am now able to boot using the cd and get into ghost normal.. I am also able to create the image over gigabut with the universal driver only 2 1/2 hours.. but when i try to restore the image it is going to take 319 hrs... the speed is only at 19 MB/min. I have tried the Universal, Nvidia nforce, and the yukon gigabit drivers.. All have the same results..  i know the switch / crossover cable is workign since i can create the image with good speeds..

ok i have good news and bad news...


Good news i got everything working...

Bad news it is on a different model mainboard..

ok i was using a Acer  ASE360 mainboard.. it has a Marvell 888E1111 integrated lan card..

now i tested it on a Acer ASE380 mainboard.. it has a Marvell 88E8056 integrated lan card..

i was able to get the ASE380 to work over gigabit.. with the yukon driver.. is there a driver for the 888E1111? that would help me out major.. as i would have to replace all the units i currently have.. or is there a recomended giga pci card that i could use on the ASE360??

Message Edited by myk3 on 05-22-200704:30 PM

I beleive it does... What am i looking for? also would the IRQs affect the upstream / downstream of the lan card? the upstream works normal but not the downstream... thanks.. i will try the universal (irqcfg) driver. I think thats the one you are talking about.. yes i am using 11.
 

ok i tried the universal (irqcfg) with no luck same problem... any other suggestions?

Hi,

To answer your first question, they may affect differently to upstream and downstream, since the writing to the disk is more complex than reading. So restoring the image may get in to more problems than creating.

Could you run the task and press F8 when the client say 'starting PCDOS'? Then it allows you to select step by step mode. Can you check, what does 'irqcfg' command say? It either say no conflicts found, successfully re-assigned or unable to re-assign.

irqcfg is looking only for the conflicts between Disk and network. There could be many other conflicts exist, like one of the forum posts described. In that case, disk and the audio was using the same IRQ.

Other than IRQ conflicts, there could be many other bottlenecks. It is worth finding out if restore (writing to the disk) performs well when there is no netwrok involved.

We have seen situations where the network driver (or the card) is sensitive to the model of the switch or the hub it is connected to (couple of forum posts on that too), as well as situations where we could not find the reason.

Krish

well i am able to write to the disk using a on board hdd... i am not able to get the pc-dos boot disk to work... I am able to only get ms-dos to work.. when i create a pc-dos bootdisk it says

hd-****

Boot Failure.


the MS-Dos version works "normal"

thanks

If you can restore from the local machine, most probably it is a conflict.

You can follow the same process using F8 for MSDOS too. Could you see if it gives any clues?

Krish

ok... I did the step by step and the irqcfg.exe found no IRQ conflicts... when i try to restore using a 10/100 switch and or crossover cable the restore is about 70 hrs on 317 GB but when i try it on a 10/100/1000 switch or crossover cable it says 719 hrs to restore and starts the restore at 32MB min and then falls to 9MB min and stays there..

ok i just did anohter peer to peer and had even worse results than with server and client..

Hi,

So all your tests show that the problem is network driver. Since there is only one DOS driver available for Yukon (from www.marvell.com/drivers) I can't see any other drivers you can use.

Only other possibility is changing the parameters according to the documentation in the driver package from above url. It might help you to get better performance but it is a long shot. If I can find any of these cards I will have a look.

Krish

I was able to get everything working but i was having to use ghost32 to do it.. I was unable to get everything working in dos.. thanks for the help though

Glad to hear that you found a solution, yes, finding and DOS drivers and booting to DOS getting difficult more and more.

Currently, we do not support Ghost32 with Console, but if you are not using Console, WinPE is a better choice.

Krish

I was really hoping to get it done in dos but o well.. Maybe you can answer me another question... Is there a way to get a image server to send multiple images to different machines over the network? say i have apc 1 that wants image 1 and pc 2 that wants img 2. Can i get them to pull the images from the server at different times? would this even be a viable solution? will this be a network hog? it will be on a dedicated network though...

Hi,

If you do not have too many different images to download, one option is to run multiple sessions of GhostCast server with different session names. You can select 'restart after completion' option, so that it will again go to waiting for client state after downloading the server.

Other than that, we too love to have the functionality to send the image name from Ghost and ask multicast server to send it down, but it is not yet supported.

If you are concerned about the network load, one option is limiting the thruput from GhostCast server. However, this will make the restore process slower.

Krish

Message Edited by Krish Jayaratne on 07-23-200707:43 PM