Ghost: Peer-to-Peer TCP/IP ... Nightmare!

[David_Jones]

Hi All,

I am having a nightmare trying to get two laptops to talk to each other using Ghost Enterprise 6.5.1 and a TCP/IP P2P connection.

I have set up both with their PCMCIA cards (3COM on one, Xircom on the other).

I have downloaded the latest DOS drivers from the respective manufacturers.

I created two Ghost Network Boot Disks using the wizard in Ghost, and used the latest drivers rather than any of the pre-existing options in the list.

Both PCs boot up fine, and go through the motions to get into Ghost, leading me to believe that they recognise the cards fine.

However, I cannot get Ghost to make the TCP/IP connection.

I am using class C static IPs (192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2) and I am being careful how they are entered in the slave and master consoles.

I am using a Cat-5 crossover cable between the two PCs (although I have tried a standard UDP cable too just in case Symantec found a way around that one!)

The correct disk is in the correct PC (with PCMCIA card) - just thought I would confirm that for you!

I set off the slave first, and it tells me that I should use 192.168.0.1 in the master console.

I then set off the master, and enter 192.168.0.1 but it fails to connect.

Symantec suggest that Plug-N-Play can stop DOS seeing the cards, but I cannot find any BIOS settings relating to Plug-N-Play in either machine (feel free to tell me they are / must be there).

The two laptops are:

IBM Thinkpad A31 (almost brand new)
Dell Latitude CPiX (appx 2 years old)


I am tearing my hair out to get this to work for someone, and I swore it would, but so far it is proving me to be a liar!

Any help, suggestions, or even just questions would be welcome since I am out of ideas.

I guess it would be good to confirm for sure that the cards are working and accessible from DOS. Does anyone know how to do that?

Thanks,

David.

[ktkendall]

I have also tried to do the same thing with my laptop so I could back the HD up, but sad to say I ended up giving up. The problem is the PCMCIA socket. That is what has to also be recognized under DOS for the NIC card drivers to initialize the NIC card. Don"t know if yours is same prob, but maybe that will give you something to look into.

[David_Jones]

Sounds reasonable KTKendall.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can confirm for sure whether the PCMCIA socket is being recognised under DOS?

Perhaps to turn it around, would I get error messages during the boot from the Ghost Boot Disk if the PCMCIA socket was NOT recognised?

Thanks,

David,

[David_Jones]

Further to an offline discussion I had, I tried another laptop in place of the IBM Thinkpad A31.

I used the same card / boot disk in an old Compaq Armada and it worked perfectly connecting with the Dell.

Therefore, I now know that the cards are compatible with their boot disks, and the cables work etc.

Obviously the problem is in the setup on the Thinkpad.

Given that I am booting from a diskette, the only place it can be seems to me to be the BIOS?

I have looked carefully through the BIOS setup, but I cannot find an option to deactivate Plug N Play anywhere (as suggested in the Symantec Ghost site).

Any ideas on where I might find that setting?

Thanks,

David.

[ktkendall]

Mine was an old Panasonic cf-25 (toughbook) and, I am not sure if I got errors or not, as it was a while ago. Seems like I did get an error with the NIC driver cause it couldn't find the nic card cause the socket needed drivers which I couldn't find. The only bios option that comes to my mind is the one that says plug and play OS (yes or no), most every bios i've seen has that one.

[ktkendall]

You are on the right track with the prob being in the BIOS, I think the difference is in that some of the laptops, the PCMCIA is initialized by the BIOS much like your other IO ports, (serial & Parallel) are and in some it is not cause it lets the OS initialize the PCMCIA socket. When you look at device manager in windows you'll see the PCMCIA socket as a deveice with it's own drivers.

[David_Jones]

Thanks KTKendall,

I'll revisit the BIOS, and see if I can make it work by 'tweaking' the IO ports as you mentioned.

Since I am not loading Win 2000 at the same time, I am fairly happy making temporary changes to the BIOS for this purpose, and then resetting them afterwards.

I'll let you know if I get any further!

David.

PS: I now have a much better understanding of PCMCIA sockets, PC / LAN cards etc than I did before, so nothing is ever a waste of time!

[ktkendall]

David;
You have made a good point, even though I was unsuccessful at my attempt and did spend a few hours trying to acclomplish the task and was not able, I did learn some things along the way.
KK

PS. I wonder if the laptops you did get to work had a built-in NIC as opossed to PCMCIA type:

[David_Jones]

Hi KTKendall,

I'm not sure if the two laptops that can talk to each other (Dell Latitude and Compaq Armada) have built in NICs too. I assumed they did not (partly due to the lack of a built in Cat 5 UDP cable type of socket for the network cable to plug in to).

Therefore, I inserted the PC Cards into the PCMCIA sockets and it worked fine.

However, on the IBM Thinkpad A31, there IS a built in network socket. Do you think that may have some bearing on my problem?

Thanks for walking down this path with me - it is much less lonesome this way!

David.

[glc]

If you are using the builtin network card in there, it may be Windows-only.........try using a PCMCIA card.

[Byte 2.0]

Can I shot this in a new direction. Looks like u are killing yourself over this. I have no solution to make it work with the PCMCIA nics. What about using the parallel printer port to transfer?

I forget the exact cable type you need to do this, I know i keep one around. I will try to get you the name of the cable.

PARALLEL LAPLINK CABLE DB25 M/M. I know I picked one up at wal mart awhile back. It is M to M 25 Pin and it was belkin.

That might be a better way to go. Should work above 6.0 dos and higher. Yes it is slow but it should work.

[David_Jones]

Hi Byte,

I was using a parallel cable for this type of thing in the past, and it has always worked absolutely fine.

The problem is purely speed.

The parallel connection seems to give me transfer speeds in Ghost of about 4-5 Mb / min. With a Cat 5 Crossover cable, I can get about 25-30 Mb / min (between two other laptops).

I'm not sure if those numbers relate to the data that is being read on the source disk, or the data written to the destination image (I use high compression to keep the CD costs down, and data transfer quantity to a minimum).

However, whichever it is measuring, the parallel cable will take approximately 5 to 6 times longer to ghost a given disk size.

In the past that wasn't an issue with, say, a 5Gb disk, I could ghost it overnight (or thereabouts) which was fine (I am using the "Disk Image All" (?) option to get a complete image).

With a disk of, say, 30Gb (more common now), it is taking up to 100 hours which means I cannot even do it over a weekend.

Therefore, I wanted to 'upgrade' to the Cat 5 Crossover cable and use the TCP/IP option.

However, thank you for the suggestion - it is always good to think around a problem, and often the best solution is found there!


Hi GLC,

I have tried to use a PCMCIA card, but I cannot seem to get the laptop to talk to any other laptop using it. I am wondering if I need to disable PnP to make it work, but I cannot seem to find an option in the BIOS to do that having gone through every setting systematically twice.

Is it possible that there is a conflict between the PCMCIA socket / PC Card and something else?


Thanks for your suggestions - I am still learning fast here!

David.

[Mac Medic]

For some reason i have never gotten a PCMCIA card to work in DOS, the problem for me has always been the PC Card controller and the lack of dos support for it. Both Dell and Compaq have said drivers for pcmcia card services dont exist??. Not sure i believe this but i havent really dug very deep either. Maybe someone could clear this up aswell.

[glc]

I'm gonna go back in time and try to remember details of when I was working with notebooks and Dos/Win 3.1. I used to use a 486 laptop with a 14.4 PCMCIA modem for my Internet access (well, AOL) in those days.

There were 2 ways to get a PCMCIA card working in Dos; one of which was loading "card and socket services" in config.sys and autoexec.bat, and the other way was using a "point enabler" for the card. The point enabler is a driver from the card manufacturer, the card and socket services drivers are from the notebook manufacturer. The only time I had to use a "point enabler" was in a Toshiba notebook that had proprietary card slots that I could not find drivers for, but 3Com/Megahertz had a point enabler available for the card. Industry standard 16 bit PCMCIA generally used card and socket services from Systemsoft, but with today's 32 bit "Cardbus" sockets I honestly don't know what, if any, Dos drivers will work with them.

David - is there a setting in the bios in that machine to disable the onboard LAN adapter?

[David_Jones]

Hi GLC,

I cannot see anything specific to the onboard LAN adapter, but I can disable all serial ports.

On the basis that it couldn't do any harm, I tried disabling, but it still wouldn't work, so I have re-enabled.

I think I will try talking to IBM again. The tech support lady told me before that the onboard card would not work under DOS (hence trying to use a PCMCIA socket), but I would have thought that a DOS NDIS driver must exist for the onboard card?

I'll post back if I get anywhere with them.

Thanks for your help so far.

David.

[glc]

Not necessarily - that may be a software-driven onboard NIC, similar to a "Winmodem".