Ghost Solution Suite

Hi,
 
Hopefully someone can put me out of my misery one way or another.
 
I have a Belkin Gigabit USB 2.0 Network adapter, Model #: F5D5055 and I’m trying to get it to work with Symantec ghost 11.5. I have gone to the Belkin website (http://en-us-support.belkin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/541) and downloaded the vista drivers for it and when I try to add them to ghost via the ghost boot wizard it keeps telling me ‘Failed to find any drivers to add’. I have also tried the Win7 drivers which do the same thing. Does anyone know of a way to get this product to work with ghost or does it simply not because the driver is not designed for it or something?
 
 Any help appreciated.

Hi,

Went to the website you've posted and it seems the download file for vista drivers has an .inf and .sys file only. Think some of the essential drivers are missing there.

Why are you trying to add the drivers to the boot package ?

Regards,
Prasanna

I've brought a pc with just a built in wireless device and 1 usb port. I want to make a ghost image like i do with my other computers across my network. I noticed that it did not have alot of files in the vista download but it does install the device on vista and as i said i also tried the windows 7 drivers which also work in vista, these drivers have more files and seem like they should work for ghost but they dont. If i could get this device to work i would also never need to worry about what network card to use on my computers when backing them up and i could use the usb network adapter for them all which would be very handy.

I had a look at the INF file associated with the Vista driver, and it only references one SYS file in the INF, so I'm guessing that the problem is not related to missing files.
Since WinPE is intended as a pre-installation platform and not a full blown operating system, its support for plug and play is quite limited.
I suspect that simple block storage USB devices such as flash memory sticks and hard disks can be mounted without needing additional driver support, but trying the more complex task of layering a network card driver on top of a USB driver may be a step too far.
However, it seems odd that you are being told "Failed to find any drivers to load". Have you tried loading a different driver - say for an INTEL or BROADCOM NIC, just to check whether it might be a more generic issue?

Personally, I have found USB NICs to be particularly slow at data transfer and would never consider them for hard disk imaging. As you have a USB port, you could easily use a bootable USB hard disk running WinPE to image your machine, and the process is likely to prove much faster than doing it over a network connection.

I have tried other drivers just to make sure i was doing it all right and they worked fine.

I am not to bothered about speed, a number of hard drives i backup cant compress the image at a faster rate then what the network can support anyways, even on a ssd I’m finding that a transfer speed of a bout 15MB a sec is the max ghost will go at so when a little notebooks slow old hdd is managing 100MB a min from hdd to hdd having a slow usb network adapter is not that much of an issue. What is more important to me is to be able to just burn 1 CD to disk and be able to plug the usb adapter into any computer and make a back up of it with out the need to always find its network driver, add it to ghost then burn another disk. I have also found that sometimes if the computer is not working correctly that a usb hdd is not always possible to use to back up a hdd, especially if the hdd is broken or is corrupted, where as sometimes doing it via a network transfer it works better or recovers more data, its just always better to have more options open to try when things are not going right then to just limit myself to only doing it via a usb hdd.

This is one of the main reasons I brought this device for and have spent a number of days now trying to get it to work with ghost with no success :(

You do not need to burn a new CD each time in order to test if a driver can be loaded by WinPE, as driver loading can be achieved at the WinPE command prompt. See the following MS technote: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766220(WS.10).aspx

So if you boot WinPE and get to the command prompt, you should be able to read CD and USB devices, so if your driver files are on a USB stick, you can try loading the driver from a USB stick and see whether WinPE gives you an error or not.

If you want to hand crank a WinPE bootable device from scratch, see the following article:
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyadventures-winpe

Plan B might be to try a different manufacturer's USB NIC and see how you get on. Of course, you don't need to buy it first, as no doubt once you have a model number, you can download the latest drivers from the manufacturer's website and try them under your WinPE boot environment. If the alternative drivers load OK, then at least you have a fighting chance.  If they don't load either, then it will add weight to the hypothesis that USB NICs may not work under WinPE.