Ghost Solution Suite

Please bear with me as I'm new to Ghost AND I'm a unix system administrator who can barely navigate on a windows machine!!! 

I have Ghost 11.5 installed and I was able to create a LINUX image for my DELL Optiplex 960's with no problem.  I'm not able to get it to work with the Optiplex GX620.  I assumed it was a NIC driver issue so I made sure to incorporate the correct driver on the ghost boot CD but I still get the error 10030 - unable to contact ghostcast server.

I need to clarify some of the information you have provided. If I understand you correctly, you have installed Linux on your DELL machines and now want to create an image using Ghost.

You are using Ghost Boot Wizard to create a boot image (please clarify whether DOS or WinPE) and the image you create is then giving you an error 10030 when you try to connect to the Ghostcast server.

If any of this is incorrect, please provide more information on what exactly you are doing at each step.

Assuming my understanding is correct, I can confirm that error 10030 is usually caused by NIC drivers not working, so we need to delve a little deeper into what you are doing and which drivers you are using, and what chipset the GX620 uses for its NIC interface.

For modern hardware I would always recommend using WinPE as DOS is severely limited in its support for things like SATA hard disks and optical devices, which are now pretty much standard on all new machines.

When adding drivers to Ghost boot wizard, you need to use VISTA 32 bit drivers as this is the version required by WinPE (regardless of what operating system you are imaging).  Once the drivers are added, they also need to be SELECTED so that they get incorporated when you rebuild the boot image,

Let us know how you get on and whether my understanding of your problem is correct.

EdT, you are correct in your assumptions; sorry I wasn't more specific.  I've tried to find the driver that you mentioned.  I've only been able to find the driver for 2K, XP and XP64.  When I've downloaded the drivers from either Broadcom or DELL and tried to import them to my ghost boot wizard it tells me that it can find no drivers to import.  Thanks for the reply

So can we assume that WinPE is being used?

Also, do you happen to know what chipset is being used for your NIC?  Once we know the chipset, some driver sources may emerge, eg from past postings.

Finally, what form are the drivers in that you are trying to import?  For WinPE to be able to load a driver, the fileset needs to consist of at least the following:

.....a SYS CAT and INF file, and perhaps some additional DLL files.  It is the INF file that WinPE uses to determine whether the driver can be loaded.

Many driver downloads are in EXE format and therefore need to be "extracted" - sometimes opening the EXE using WinZIP will reveal the files contained within, and sometimes just running the EXE will result in a decompress into a specified folder before the installation process is kicked off.

By the way - this forum does have a search engine, so searching on your DELL model and/or the chipset used for your NIC support will often throw up past threads with helpful content.

Reboot GX620 machine to preos using winpe boot disk
Select the option Peer to peer->TCP/IP->Slave
You should get the ipaddress of GX620. If not, Download Vista 32bit NIC driver from NIC manufacturer website(Broadcom.com).
Add it to winpe and choose applicable OS as Vista.
Create Winpe boot disk and reboot GX620 machine to preos
Select Ghostcast->Unicast, and enter the session name and Ghost server ipaddress
Make sure Windows Firewall is stopped from services.

Ghost have been tested with this model and should not have any issue. This seems to be critical driver issue (storage or network). Please try the option which GhoRider and EdT mentioned above in their respective threads.

This problem has been resolved.  It wasn't a NIC issue.  It was a DHCP reservation problem, my bad.  Thanks so much for your responses