Ghost 10 Recovery Environment Blue Screens with K8WE (S2895) Motherboard

Hi Fellow K8WE Enthusiasts:

I posted this on the symantec.customerservice.general newsgroup.
I decided to crosspost here, just in case someone else has seen
this with the K8WE. The place were I usually post these types
of messages, www.k8we.com has been unavailable for a few days
now. I'm sure someone there would have responded. Can anyone
from mainboard.tyan shed some light on this?

I called our system builder yesterday and had him change our
software configuration to include Ghost 10 instead of Ghost 9,
thinking that everything would be fine. Famous last words...
Anyway, I tried to do a Ghost 10 restore this morning and the
product CD boot died with a


STOP 0x0000009C MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION.


I tried an identical system with the same results. I decided
to try one of Symantec's Enterprise products, LiveState
Advanced Server 3.03 instead. It booted fine. Then I tried the
new version LiveState 6.0 and I get the exact same Blue
Screen, trying to boot into it's recovery environment as I did
with Ghost 10. Ghost 9 works fine. I ordered a copy of Live-
State Desktop 6.0 to try, but it won't be in until Tuesday. I
expect it to fail. And just by chance I ordered a copy of
Acronis TrueImage 9.0, in case I have to do a quick software
switch.


We're using the Tyan K8WE (s2895) motherboard with 4 Gig
of ECC memory. It has 2 Opteron 244 processors. We're
not using dual SLI graphics, just a single low to mid range
ATI FireGL V3100 PCI Express card. There is also a PCI-X
Digi Nero 8 port serial card and an Intel PCI-X dual port server
network card in the system. The system is based on the
Nvidia Nforce Professional 2200 and 2050 chipsets. There are
2 onboard Nvidia network controllers. We're not using NVidia's
onboard RAID, which I believe is really BIOS controlled Micro-
Soft Software RAID. We just have 2 Seagate 7200.8 160 Gig
SATA 150 hard drives. It's all in a Chenbro 19" 3U rackmount
case.

I'm wondering if anyone has seen this problem or has my
company discovered something unique. The Motherboard has
become somewhat popular, but it's nearly a year old now. HP
is using it in one of their high end workstations. It sure
would be nice if Ghost 10 would work with it.


There doesn't seem to be a diagnostic feature so I can't tell
exactly where things are going wrong during the boot. When
I press any key to start the CD boot I see the following:


STARTING SYMANTEC RECOVERY DISK . . .
After about 20 seconds the following appears:
PLEASE WAIT . . .
After about 15 seconds
The hard drive activity light flashes briefly
Then in about 15 seconds I get the following Blue Screen


MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION
STOP 0x0000009C (0x00000004, 0x8089A7A0, 0xB2000000, 0x00070F0F)

What the hell did Symantec do when it upgraded Live-
State from 3.0 to 6.0 and Ghost from 9.0 to 10.0?


I haven't called Symantec yet. Their support group is a
challenge in itself. I was wondering if we could send these
system out to our customers with Ghost 10 installed and a
copy of the Ghost 9.0 CD so they could boot to recover.
Sort of a partial downgrade install. Was also wondering if
there is a new version of the software that fixes the
problem or if it's possible to make modifications to the boot
CD to get it to work.


The crash seems to appear at the time the system is supposed
to move from character mode to graphic mode and display a
mouse pointer. However, that's just my speculation.


Anyway, thanks in advance for any insight and I'll post anything
I learn here later.


Rgds,


Dennis Herrick

I've encountered the same problem; Ghost 10 recovery disk getting a blue
screen but Drive Image 7 (precursor technology to Ghost 10, as used in Ghost
9) working OK. Similar configuration but with 275 Opterons and am using an
Adaptec RAID board to mirror the boot drive. Spoke to my system vendor and he
suggests that Ghost 10 uses a boot O/S based on Win2000 which is not
supported with the K8WE/Win2000. The other possibility is just having the
correct drivers for the networking cards and other hardware - Ghost 10 has a
profiling utility (somewhere!) that lists drivers which are not on the
recover CD so you can source them and put them on floppy for the recovery
disk to access on boot-up (it very briefly flashes up an option to hit F6 if
you want to supply extra drivers). I'm waiting on Symantec support to get
back to me and have got a bunch of other things to try (I was told to try
disabling hyperthreading but havent' found out how yet; tried disabling multi-
core support in the BIOS but that didn't help). I'll post back here if I
manage to get it to work! I've seen a couple of mentions elsewhere regarding
this problem but with no solutions as yet. - cheers, AQ

I got something to work with Symantec's help.

I emailed a request for support with Symantec. They got back to me in
2 days with suggestions. Still no luck. They gave me access to their
ftp download site. I downloaded several bootable ISO files. I used
MagicISO to open one of the downloaded files called GHOST10.ISO. I
believe it's generic Ghost 10's bootable Recovery Environment. I
removed all of the NV* drivers from the i386\system32\drivers directory

and replaced them with NV* drivers from my running Windows XP Pro
Service PACK 2 system. 3 drivers were missing, one, NVRAID.SYS was
available off the Tyan K8WE Motherboard support CD. NVENET.SYS and
NVEFDXP.SYS were not readily available, so I simply moved back the
original copies that I had removed from the GHOST10.ISO to begin with.
I saved a copy of this modified ISO file and burned a copy to CD. It
booted just fine and I successfully recovered an image I had snapped,
using Ghost 10 a few weeks ago.


I plan to test Nvidia's latest drivers and try to narrow down which
driver out of the 15 or so available is actually causing the problem

Results in from my final tests...

I have been able to run further tests and I have narrowed down the
driver that is causing Ghost 10 and LiveState 6 to crash while booting
the Symantec Recovery Environment with the Tyan K8WE nForce Pro 2200
2050 based motherboard. I'm not sure if it also effects the MSI and
Asus nForce Pro based motherboards. Anyway. I used MagicISO to create
iso files out of the GHOST 10 and LiveState 6 product CDs. I opened up
each iso file and went to the drivers directory. I deleted the
NVATABUS.SYS file. Earlier I had downloaded the following driver set
from the Nvidia website, nForce_430_410_8.22_winxp2k_english.exe.
After extracting it, I discovered a more recent copy of the
NVATABUS.SYS file in the following directory:

C:\NVIDIA\nForceWin2KXP\8.22\IDE\WinXP\sataraid

I used MagicISO to insert this file in the drivers directory in both
iso files I saved a copy of each of the modified iso files and burnt
them to CD. I was able to boot the LiveState 6 and Ghost 10 Recovery
Environment without a crash. I'm not saying this is the end of the
story as there were several files in the sataraid directory. Perhaps
some of them need to be inserted too or all of the version 8.22 drivers
for a complete fix. But, there were no blue screens while booting and
that was all I was trying to prove.

I finally, asked the Symantec support guy the following question.
Any chance you can forward this change request off to your developers
for inclusion in a future Ghost 10.01 release or a LiveState Desktop
6.01 release? It's always more convenient if the product works right
out of the box.