Deployment Solution

I'm trying to dowload  an image on to a lab of 24 Dell Optiples520 computers. The imaging is very very slow. I have followed all the info i could find on this site but have no luck. Can any one help?

If your network doesn't handle multicasting, it can get extremely slow then hang. Did you try forcing Unicasting?
Has it always been this slow and what speed is the transfer?

Hello,

Most likely the network card is not negotiating with the switch correctly.

I would check the network card on the server and switch to full duplex is 100 MB switch and auto if 1 GB switch, also check you have loaded the correct driver into the Deployment Console.

Regards,

Synergy

I have set the server NIC to 100MB full duplex
I have tried several drivers in the console, at the moment  i am using intels e1000.dos and have set the NIC to run at 100MB full duplex.
I have been unable to image by multícasting

To check, log onto your Altiris server and go to your Start Menu, All Programs, Altiris, Deployment Solution, and then Configuration.

Click Options, then head to your Transport Tab.  Is Disable Multicast Checkmarked?  If so, uncheck it.  Also, go to your Disk Imaging Tab and check to make sure that "Use disk image multicast threhold" is set to a value not too high to test with.  For example, for the number 3, we would have 3 clients connect up to each master.

What automation OS are you using? Are you using PXE?

I'm using PXE
Multicasting is enabled
Multicast threshold is set to 3

Are you using WinPE?
While your imaging does one computer say "restore and send" and the other say "client restore"?

No, I'm not using WinPE

Force Unicasting on the image and see if it is faster.

So are you using DOS or Linux?

I'm using DOS

You might want to try using WinPE or Linux. Either one of those will be faster than DOS.

So how do I go about that? Is there a white paper available? Where do I get the files from?

You'll need to download the frm file from ftp.altiris.com/Product/Deployment_Server/ depending on what version of DS you're using. Then you need to setup the boot disk for either WinPE, Linux or both. The last step would be to change the jobs to use the new boot disks.