Ghost Solution Suite

I recently installed Symantec Ghost Console 11.5.1.2266 on a Windows 2008 R2 server.

I am now trying to take an image of our new laptops HP ProDesk 600  (Windows 7 64Bit, NIC i217-LM) and the HP EliteBook 850 (Windows 7 64Bit, NIC i218-LM). 

I downloaded the NIC drivers from here....

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18713&lang=eng&OSVersion=Windows%207%20%20*&DownloadType=

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18713&lang=eng&OSVersion=Windows%207%20%20*&DownloadType=Drivers

I've tried creating a Windows PE USB Boot drive throught the Ghost Boot Wizard. I added the drivers (listed above) to the WinPE file  with a static IP address as we're not using DHCP. 

However, when I boot up a computer and try to connect to a Ghost session on the server (I've tried unicast, broadcast or multicast) the session never connects and just times out.

Any idea where I'm going wrong here? I can provide more information as needed.

Thank you!

Just a quick update. I created a USB Boot Drive formatted with the PC-DOS settings. I see that the static IP address gets assigned to the client, but it wont connect to the session.

There's are also no firewalls between the clients and the server. They are on the same network together.

Thanks.

Can you ping the server from either the WinPE or the PCDOS boot key?  What network protocols does your server offer, and is this a first time ever installation for you, or did you have a previous Ghost server up and running?

The most common reason for the problems you are experiencing is a failure for the NIC drivers to load correctly on the machine being imaged. When you use DHCP then it it pretty obvious as the IP address defaults to 127.0.0.0 if there is no connection, but with static IP addressing, I believe the IP address can get assigned even if one "layer" of the network stack has not loaded properly.

With WinPE, bear in mind that you need to add NIC drivers for Vista 32 bit edition, as WinPE V2 is based on the Vista kernel. This is a requirement regardless of what operating system you are imaging. However, some modern machines do not offer Vista drivers, so you may need to look at creating a WinPE V3.1 environment based on the Win 7 kernel and use Win 7 drivers. Terry Bu has written a nice article about how to do this:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/creating-and-using-winpe31-image-gss-251

and a second article, which he will no doubt post the URL to, adds further information about fooling the Ghost environment with the newer drivers.