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Ghost Solution Suite 1.0 Deployment. Cannot push client to Dell Optiplex 210L - Driver Issue?

We have Ghost Solution Suite 1.0  ( or version 8.2 of Ghost) and we cannot get images to deploy to Dell Optiplex 210L machines.  We have tried the Intel PRO 100 driver shipped with Ghost Solution Suite and we have downloaded drivers from Intel that purport to work, but none of the above allows us to properly install the Ghost client software, connect and run a session.

Boot floppies and boot CDs work, but we can't use Ghost Console to communicate with these machines.

We always get "unable to connect to Virtual Partition" errors.

The Universal Packet Driver from 8.3 seems to work a little better, but it too fails to allow Ghost console to push out the Ghost client.

Solution Suite 1.1 does work, but we are trying to avoid an upgrade (and the associated cost).  Any suggestions are gratefully received!

Thanks.
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pgm554
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The main problem with those machines ,is that they are using the Intel VE NIC which is a piece of crap.

Think of it as a PCI win modem,it relys on the MOBO chipset and processor for i/o and processing.

Cheap,but flakey.
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pgm554
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Yes, we have done that, but that isn't what we really need to do. We really want to operate Ghost console from a remote location to avoid having to "touch the desktops".  In that way, we could manage a room-full of computers from another room, another city, another state, another country? ;).    Anyway, what we seem to have discovered thus far is that GSS 1.0 or Ghost console 8.2 cannot manage the NICs in those Optiplex machines.  Why exactly, I'm not sure.  (Piece of c***, maybe, but that's what we've got.)

So, we decided to test out GSS 1.1 or Ghost console 8.3.  Well, that works - sort of...  It cannot do a remote install and push the Ghost client software out, but if you do an install from the desktop using a CD or over the network via a shared folder, you can get the client software working.

Once that is done and the machine is a member of a domain, you can see that machine in Ghost console's inventory and control the machine.

So, the answer may be either:

1. Upgrade to GSS 1.1

or

2. Purchase different network cards, go into BIOS and disable the on-board Intel PRO/100 VE chips and then try the push install.  At $20 or even $50 for network cards, and 25 to 50 computers, it is cheaper - in either case - to upgrade.  Besides, VISTA is coming and we, for sure, won't want to be mucking around in BIOS to support that - nor do we want to have to add additional hardware like NICs to support it.  The memory and hard disk requirements alone will get expensive.

One more point, we did have to go into BIOS on the Optiplex 210L (we have Optiplex 170's too but haven't fooled with Ghost and these machines yet).  We set the NIC to PXE/On.  That seemed to work best as simply setting the NIC to "On" didn't work.

So. we'll award the 500 points to pgm54 as those answers were on the right track - even if those weren't the answers we wanted to hear!

Thanks muchly!