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My ghost falls asleep....

  • 1.  My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 02, 2007 04:19 PM
    Our company has recieved 25 new gateway desktops (supposedly exact copies).
     
    We found that to make a ghostcast work, we must change the drive config from Enhanced to legacy.
     
    However, we have run across some machines that load all the drives correctly, detects our network, and then it begins to load the ghost program. After a while, the floppy LED will go dim and the screen will just sit there with "Loading..." displayed. No matter how long you sit there and kick, yell, cuss, or abuse the computer, it will not load the program.
     
    We  have tripple checked the BIOS settings and the hardware, memory, network card, floppy drive, ect, and everything seems to be EXACTLY ALIKE! It happened to about 45% of our computers. It just doesn't make sense that some machines will work (and load), and others wont.
     
    If anyone can give me a reason this is happening, I will jump up and down with excitment.


  • 2.  RE: My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 02, 2007 04:41 PM
    Very strange. I'm assuming you are booting from floppy. It would be good to rule out differences in floppy drive alignment, if you have not done so already.

    The best way to do this is to take one of the failed machines, and create a new floppy set using that machine. If that  machine is happy to boot floppies created by it, but cannot boot the ghost floppies created by another machine, then it is likely the floppy drive head alignment position differs between the two machines.

    However, usually if this was a floppy drive hardware alignment issue, I would expect a 'cannot read disk' error or something similar. I think it is worth peforming this check though.




    Message Edited by Xan Todd on 07-03-200709:47 AM



  • 3.  RE: My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 02, 2007 05:10 PM

    Well it’s worth a shot. I never considered the possibility of hardware differences in the floppy drive.

     

    Yes, we are booting from floppy disks, and now I'm off to go check the alignments.

     

    You would think that gateway would assemble the computers with the same parts but maybe that’s too much to ask. Just today I found a computer they shipped us that didn't have its CPU fan plugged in.

     

    Haha, its a good thing I'm cynical or this job would kill me. I'll keep you posted.

     

    Thanks,

     

    ~Brian



  • 4.  RE: My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 03, 2007 10:42 AM
    Well its not the floppy alignment. I believe it has something to do with the SETA drive itself. When we take the drive out of the comp, it will boot just fine. But you can't ghost the drive if its not hooked up or recognized.
     
    Any solutions?


  • 5.  RE: My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 03, 2007 06:50 PM
    Hi Brian,
     
    Please check the disk driver under "device manage" and see whether the SATA drive emulates an ide or scsi device.   If it emulates scsi device you can try to use -noide switch with the ghost.exe.  You need to recreate the boot floppies and add the switch in the parameters field.
     
    Cheers,
    Jenny
     
     


  • 6.  RE: My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 03, 2007 07:51 PM
    In either case, it would be interesting to know if ghost will load for you or not when using the -noide switch.

    Then right out in left field, you could also try -noscsi -no1394 -nousb, just in case there is some kind of bizzare device hang there.

    Separately, it might be worthwhile to compare the bios revisions of the known good and bad machines. Additionally, in any case, I'd suggest trying a bios upgrade first of all. After this I'd also suggest trying earlier bios revisions as well, in case you are experiencing a weird issue introduced in later revisions.

    I'm not sure which network driver you are using. If you are using the universal driver, consider recreating the boot environment using the "universal driver with irqcfg". This causes a utliity to run prior to the driver load which checks for and attempts to resolve irq conflicts. The check stage blips past quickly, so you'll need to watch carefully to see if it reports anything.

    It certainly is strange that you are experiencing this with some but not all of your machines of the same model. It might be interesting to remove some of the HDD's and see if the HDD's are using a different firmware revision. In either case, perhaps a good test would be to swap HDD's between a known good and known problem machine, and see if there is any change in behaviour for either machine. At least this particular test will rule out hdd differences and/or some kind of very bizzare and unheard of bios/hdd interaction issue.

    Message Edited by Xan Todd on 07-04-200712:58 PM



  • 7.  RE: My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 05, 2007 08:52 AM
    The -noide / noscsi sounds promissing. I forget if I have said so before, but the computers that hang on the load worked fine when we removed the drive.
     
    Updated the bios is not an option at this point. The machines are brand new, just out of the box and preloaded with vista. I'm not about to load vista on the machine just to update the bios. I'd rather do what I have been. Which is to take the drives out of the problematic machines, put them in one of the machines that loads, and then ghost them. I would do that, but after doing it to 40 plus machines, it tends to rip your hands up and slows the process down.
     
    I don't know if its the firmware or not. It seems to me that the ones that work are ignoring some kind of firmware revision / bios setting. Today I'll try some new boot disks and let you know the results.


  • 8.  RE: My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 05, 2007 09:58 AM
    Well I tried some swiches today. So far the only one that will load ghost is the -fni swich. But I can't multicast that way.
     
    I'm still trying -noide and -noscsi in combination with various driver bios settings.
     
    By the way, I googled my problem and it seems that the Intel Pro 1000 chips give people troubles like this all the time. Can you guess what chip is in the machines? The correct answer is: Intel Pro 1000.
     

    Message Edited by BrianTL on 07-05-200707:00 AM



  • 9.  RE: My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 05, 2007 10:36 AM
    Ok here are the results of my swich play:
     
    -noide : Never did get it to work. I played with the BIOS but all I got was a "invalid swich" error (10100 i think).
    -nousb : same as above.
    -no1394 : same error, same results.
    -noscsi : I got it to work when I disabled SATA in the BIOS. However, I cannot do anything over a network when I boot this way, the only actions I am allowed are the Local ones. Its the same as when I tried the -FNI swich.
     
    It seems that I can either have a network, or a drive, just not both. Any Ideas?
     
    Thanks for all your support on this.


  • 10.  RE: My ghost falls asleep....

    Posted Jul 05, 2007 04:39 PM
    Well guys, I solved the problem today.
     
    It apears that the manufactorer didn't realize that there was a primary SATA port on the Mother board. The few that worked were the few that were built correctly. (another computer's CPU fan wasn't even plugged in)
     
    I'm still kicking myself over not seeing this before.
     
    Thanks for all the troubleshooting tips. This is deffiently the most input I've seen from a company's forum. :manvery-happy:
     
    Thanks!