I have been trying to set up a peer-to-peer floppy to work with an old Hewlett Packard Vectra VL, so that I can image the drive out to another machine on the LAN.  I have created the floppy using  Norton Ghost Boot Wizard > Peer-to-Peer Network Boot Disk, and have selected them D-Link DFE-530TX  driver from within the wizard.  (The Vectra VL has the D-Link DFE-530TX+ PCI adaptor as its ethernet card, according to Device Manager.)

However, every time I try to boot from that floppy, I get:

Starting PC DOS...

Required system component is not installed

IBM Protocol Manager Version 2.1
MAC/DIS to Packet Driver converter loaded. Version 1.18
Copyright 1991 FTP Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Portions Copyright (c) 2000 Symantic Corperation

D-Link PCI Fast Ethernet NDIS 2 Driver v2.61
(C) Copyright 1998 D-Link Corperation.  All Right Reserved
FATAL: Board not found in system

MS-DOS Netbind Version 2.1
Error: 33 unable to bind.
Microsoft (R) Mouse Driver Version 8.0
[and then some other loaded stuff I didn't write down]

And then when I get to the GUI, and after the two dialog boxes, I find peer-to-peer is greyed out.

I have Norton Ghost 9.0 and Norton Ghost 2003, but have only
the latter installed at the moment.  I WANT to be able to drive image the drives of 4 or 5 different machines here, so that I'll have the original contents stored somewhere before I wipe them to expirement with installing other OSs onto them... but on the one machine I have on the LAN (the others aren't connected yet) I've not gotten past this roadblock, and want to eliminate the problem with this one before I attempt this matter on the others...

BTW, the machine I want to store the drive images on is a Dell OptiPlex GX110 running Windows XP Pro, sitting next to the Vectra VL (running Windows 98se).

I could theoretically clone the drive from the Vectra by removing it and connecting it to the IDE of the OptiPlex, but that would involve moving a bunch of things out of the way and physically moving both machines to another room to give me... well... more room to do it in...

I WANTED to just drive-image all the machines over the LAN, so I could later do it again and again whenever I felt like it...  that was, after all, the chief reason I'd bought Norton Ghost in the first place...

Anyone know why I'm having this little snag?

Okay, I have downloaded the DOS driver for my NIC. Do I just place the exe into the floppy and/or into the dir where Ghost has its drivers, or am I supposed to run it first?  That is to say, is the exe file there the actual driver, or is it a self-extracting archive containing the driver?

I have saved the how-to URLs (and saved them out as PDFs as well...) and will study them a little bit later.

As per your other question, right now I'm trying to use static IPs.  I COULD turn on the DHCP service in my D-Link router, but have it turned off right now.

I had not expected to make the other machine also be run from the boot floppy...  Oh well, I guess I've got some more tinkering to do...   

Okay, I have unpacked the archive, and have gone to the Wizard... ("Ignore that man behind the curtain...!" )    ...and, uh... do I import this as a Packet Driver or as an NDIS2 Driver?  It defaults to Packet Driver, so I guess that's the one I want.

BTW, I booted the Dell OptiPlex on the disk I'd made for its type of NIC, and it worked (got to the GUI, and the peer-to-peer option was not greyed out) without trouble, so I guess I'm fine there... except that all the drives on THAT machine are formatted NTFS...  Urk!

Brian

Do I hear the thundering hooves of 'Bart's PE' legions assaulting the Ghost 2003 fortress    --well,  nomadofnorad did say he has Ghost 9.x!

NightOwl wrote on Jun 25^th, 2005 at 1:19am:



I was staying in the background NightOwl. It was a "just in case" comment.

My knowledge of Ghost 2003 is nil. I've forgotten how to network from a floppy. Now that BartPE....

NightOwl wrote on Jun 25^th, 2005 at 1:21am:


Okay, which one is likelier to give better performance?  And by "better performance," are we talking better copy-reliability, or better throughput?

And I know Ghost 2003 will image an NTFS drive perfectly fine.  I'm wanting to store an image file onto an NTFS drive. Or, to be more specific, I want to store the image file onto an NTFS partition. Can that be done with Ghost 2003?  Or can I switch to Ghost 9.0, have that be the Master and the boot-floppy (on another machine) be Slave?  Probably a moot point, though, because I only have 128megs of RAM on the machine I want to make Master.  (Ergo, I can't boot into the Ghost 9.0 CD...)

Well, I seem to have successfully added the driver.  I boot to that machine and it now gets all the way to the GUI and gives me the peer-to-peer option.

Now, I gather I'm supposed to make the machine I want to image from the Master and the machine I want to save to the Slave, but, since the two machines I'm working with right now are on a KVM switch, it can get confusing as to which machine I'm on -- the slave or the master -- because both screens look the same...

In any event, I was aiming to make an image from the hard drive of the Vectra VL and save the image-file on the Dell OptiPlex... and I think that I had everything right... but when it got down to telling the slave where and what name to store the image as... it complaned about having limitted space to store it, and asked if I wanted to compress it more.  Then it told me there was only 5 gigs available and it needed 11.  I also couldn't see listed the .gho file I had made earlier onto the OptiPlex, which should have been in the same dir where I was trying to save.

I've got 27 gigs of free space on the partition I have Ghost 2003 installed to, and where my first image file was stored to.  (I made an image of another drive stored on the OptiPlex: the original hard drive that it came with and that I had replaced with a larger drive and cloned Windows off of.  I had left it in there in case the main drive ever got trashed, figuring I could restore from it or whatever.) I had made that image using Ghost 2003 from inside Windows.  Well, I had configured it to do that from within Windows, but of course it then exitted Windows and ran itself in DOS to carry it out, and then stored the image in the dir where Norton Ghost 2003 was itself installed.

But when I went to image the drive on the other machine, it didn't show the other one.  I gather Ghost runs itself as some sort of virtual machine when it's ghosting for you.  Does it do this on the hard drive (virtual-RAM style) or idoes it do it n RAM (placing the whole virtual-machine onto a RAM-drive)?

Is there a way to give it more elbow-room?

--  Addendum:

I made a Drive Mapping Boot Disk via the wizard, using that nic and pointing to a shared-out drive on Slave.  (The OptiPlex, confusingly enough in this context, is actually named Slave on my network.  It was the name of a ships' computer on the space-opera show Blakes 7)  Anyway, I successfully booted onto this floppy (on M5, the Vectra VL. Yeah, I named it after a computer on the original Star Trek), and it successfully linked me to the appropriate share on Slave... however, the boot disk did NOT fire up into Ghost, and doesn't have ghost.exe, or any of its varients, anywhere on it.

What's up with that?