Hi

I carefully reviewed your discussion thread about enabling external hard disks attached to USB PCMCIA cards however the solutions presented are not completely applicable to my particular problem.

I have a Compaq Laptop Presario 1200 which does not have an onboard Ethernet port and came with a Surecom EP-428x PCMCIA card for LAN connectivity.  This machine ran fine for years with Windows software until it was killed off by the bloatware so it go another lease of life running Linux.  Having upgraded the memory to max out at 400 MB it runs well under Linux and a wireless PCMCIA card runs stablily at 108 MB.  The problem is I cannot use my Ghost 11 solution suite to image this device as all the boot disks I have created will not recognise the Surecom NIC.  I got through a lot of disks.

Here is what I have tried to date.

I have made a PC and MS DOS Ghost disk using the Ghost "Make Network Boot Disk" utility and added the PCMCIA enabler files RTPCI.EXE and RTBIOS.COM and used the latest Surecom EP 428x NDIS2 driver making a new Ghost boot disk template for the Surecom.  My initial problem was that I was not exactly sure how to call the cardbus enabler files but looking at so many Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files on your site gave me some indication.

When I boot with the boot disk I seem to get very close as it recognises the NIC reporting “Ethernet Devices Detected but immediately after I get the message Surecom EP 428x card not found, serious internal error.  It suggests trying a different IRQ switch so I have added to the RTPCI.EXE /MD000 I11 and various other combinations with no joy.

Your post is limited to USB 2.0 PCMCIA cards however there must be a lot of PCMCIA NIC’s around that can work with Ghost.  I can see such a boot disk as being very useful as you would be able to use to connect any laptop with a PCMCIA slot in it however no one has posted that I could find a solution to this issue.

I found a post that included “you can't use standard ghost boot disk as loading RTPCI.EXE and RTBIOS.COM through config.sys will crash the PC. Instead one should use something like netbootdisk by easily appending these two files to floppy and autoexec.bat.  I would be interested to know in more detail the structure of the Config.sys and Autobat files I should use and what switches (if any) I should use.  My Config.sys file was able to load RTPCI.EXE but it appeared that RTBIOS.COM crashed the system.  Does anyone know what order I should use these files?

Thank you for the links.  Link 1 & 3 are essentially the same - "Ghost compatibility with PCMCIA devices" where symantec say they support PCMCIA devices if they work in DOS however mine certaily does work in DOS however Ghost support have not helped me get it working.  The article itself could have included some sample config sys files and advised some switches to the enabler.exe file but it is very unhelpful and inadequate.

Having paid for a corporate verion of Ghost 11 I  have never got the full value out of the solution due to this poor support.  If your boot disk does not give you network connectivity you essentially cannot use Ghost Cast Server so it is not acceptable for Symantec to wash their hands in the way they do.

I will let you know how I go with the excellent instructions in the Faughnan article.

Many Thanks

 

Hi

I tried to work through the Faughnan article however as it is written for a Linksys that uses an Enabler program and I am using a Surecom EP 428x that uses RTPCI.EXE as the cardbus enabler so I cannot apply the advice to my situation.  I get back to the same problem that I need to know what parameters to pass to the enabler to get it to bind. It is so frustrating to not be able to boot DOS to see the network on a perfectly functioning NIC with the correct NDIS driver.  The card light even lights with the message Ethernet device detected  only to immediately fail.

Another thing I cant understand is how as soon as PC DOS loads the very 1st thing reported is No Surecom device detected even before the enabler files have been run.  The referenced article from Faughnan seems to suggest that my Config file and the order I an calling the RTPCI.EXE file is correct so it should work but doesn't.

No matter what imaging solution I use I will have the same problem as they all work in DOS mode which is so difficult to bind to the network.  There is a real lack of generic advice out there about how PCMCIA enablers work and at what stage of the boot these programs should kick in despite the critical nature that have to any imaging solution.

Hi

Very helpful and useful advices provided, thanks a million.

I tried the netbootdisk.com your 2nd reference line without success but not the others which I will try.  Techdata promiss full PCMCIA support so it is worth a test.  I posted on the Norton Ghost site with no response.  I obtained a evaluation copy of Image for Linix from http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-linux.htm which booted me into a Linux environment that could see my PCMCIA card as a Realtec 8139 (like Ubuntu 8.05 & 9.10 does) and I could see my local network and I could mount my Windows shares.  I was also able to see USB flash drives which was also a significent challenge with Ghost.  To pardon the pun I will give Ghost the flick "booting" it out of my software solution suite and come to terms with the fact, what a terrible investment it has been for me.  The silence from their Ghost forum speaks volumes about their support offering.  I have further testing of the Image for Linux image integrity however so far I cannot fault the solution.

I will report back shortly on your other kind suggestions in case I can feed back something of help to other reviewers.

TonyR

Thanks for your feed back!

More and more, TeraByte's products are showing themselves to be the best retail product for imaging solutions for current systems (and older systems, too  ).  And, I suspect that they offer a significant usefulness for the Corporate crowd as well.  I don't know if they offer a similar function to the Ghost Console Server.  They continue to expand their usefulness and their FAQs offer great insight into many issues associated with creating and restoring images to various system setups.

Quote:

That's just sad.  If they don't support us--should we continue to support them?

NightOwl

IFW on my computer will create an image at 20 MB/sec, writing to a second internal HD. When I write an image from my computer to one of the kids' computers I get 17 MB/sec as this is the maximum network speed for their old hardware. Their computers can only create images at 8 MB/sec to a second internal HD and this is the network speed seen when writing the image to my computer. If the image is written to their HD first and then sent over the network, I see 17 MB/sec. In practice I don't do this. The image is written direct to my computer.

NightOwl

I hope you aren't getting sick of numbers.

Using No Compression, IFW on my computer will create an image at 77 MB/sec, writing to a second internal HD.
The image is created in 43% of the time of the Standard Compression time. The compressed image was 60% the size of the non-compressed image.

NightOwl

NightOwl wrote on Feb 7^th, 2010 at 9:27pm:

Nothing fancy. An almost 3 year old Dell 9150. Pentium D processor, 2 GB RAM. I think its fast HDs are most important. Two 640 GB SATA 2 Western Digital. I bought these early last year. HDTune transfer rates of 110 MB/sec which correlates fairly well with actual measurements.