Hi there,
Wonder if anyone can help. I have a particular client that I have to go and visit to perform various upgrades to their servers, a very old Citrix 1.8 Server Farm running on NetFinity 4500e boxes witn Windows NT4 TSE (Pentium 700 processors) and SCSI Raid 1 discs.
At various points, especially before making big changes, I like to be able to take a backup image of a server before I start, just in case.
So far, I have spent 6 hours trying to get Ghost to work across the network (not even to a Ghost server, just to map a network drive and save the image onto a network share) and another machine just simply won't seem to be able to access the LOCAL hard drive, it simply hangs at the point where I try and access it.
I've read through the forums and have found loads of threads about Ghosting of IBM kit, problems with network drivers, problems with out of memory errors, and so on, but I just wondered if there is anyone out there who is regularly using Ghost on 4500's on this sort of box? I ask as the last time I wasn't able to take a backup before I started the machine actually decided to stop booting after the change had been made, and it took a good long while and judicious use of NTFSforDOS to get the machine to boot again.
I'm due at this site again a week today, where my sole task is to take a backup of the server before a third party install some software on it. My concern is that, if my last visit was anything to go by, this might not even be possible, and I'd rather not look like a complete idiot who can't even take a backup of the server.
They've got Ghost V7 installed at their site, although I have a copy of Ghost 2003 locally available, and I really wanted to see if anyone has any ideas how to make this work reliably.
There are 9 servers in the farm, but they do not all appear to be configured the same (eg a boot disk which worked fine for one server didn't for another) and I am keen to avoid problems on the day.
My plan at the moment is to try and get there the day before just to make sure it is actually possible to perform the ghosting without someone else there waiting to do work.
I've gone through just about everything I can think of, overcame the out of memory issues by loading emm386 and tweaking the slow network response by changing parameters in the protocol.ini file, but just don't understand why the latest problem, Ghost not seeing the local drive, should be happening.
Do I need to specify the RAID controller driver on the network boot disk (if so, how come it worked for one of the other servers without this?) and is there anything I can do to prepare in advance to try and avoid yet another 12 hour day stuck in a server room with it not working.
Has anyone actually done this themselves??
many thanks
edlcsre
Wonder if anyone can help. I have a particular client that I have to go and visit to perform various upgrades to their servers, a very old Citrix 1.8 Server Farm running on NetFinity 4500e boxes witn Windows NT4 TSE (Pentium 700 processors) and SCSI Raid 1 discs.
At various points, especially before making big changes, I like to be able to take a backup image of a server before I start, just in case.
So far, I have spent 6 hours trying to get Ghost to work across the network (not even to a Ghost server, just to map a network drive and save the image onto a network share) and another machine just simply won't seem to be able to access the LOCAL hard drive, it simply hangs at the point where I try and access it.
I've read through the forums and have found loads of threads about Ghosting of IBM kit, problems with network drivers, problems with out of memory errors, and so on, but I just wondered if there is anyone out there who is regularly using Ghost on 4500's on this sort of box? I ask as the last time I wasn't able to take a backup before I started the machine actually decided to stop booting after the change had been made, and it took a good long while and judicious use of NTFSforDOS to get the machine to boot again.
I'm due at this site again a week today, where my sole task is to take a backup of the server before a third party install some software on it. My concern is that, if my last visit was anything to go by, this might not even be possible, and I'd rather not look like a complete idiot who can't even take a backup of the server.
They've got Ghost V7 installed at their site, although I have a copy of Ghost 2003 locally available, and I really wanted to see if anyone has any ideas how to make this work reliably.
There are 9 servers in the farm, but they do not all appear to be configured the same (eg a boot disk which worked fine for one server didn't for another) and I am keen to avoid problems on the day.
My plan at the moment is to try and get there the day before just to make sure it is actually possible to perform the ghosting without someone else there waiting to do work.
I've gone through just about everything I can think of, overcame the out of memory issues by loading emm386 and tweaking the slow network response by changing parameters in the protocol.ini file, but just don't understand why the latest problem, Ghost not seeing the local drive, should be happening.
Do I need to specify the RAID controller driver on the network boot disk (if so, how come it worked for one of the other servers without this?) and is there anything I can do to prepare in advance to try and avoid yet another 12 hour day stuck in a server room with it not working.
Has anyone actually done this themselves??
many thanks
edlcsre