I have 2 brand new identical IBM Thinkcenters. I formatted one (PC1) and installed XP Pro and all updates. Once I got the install how I wanted it, I took the hard drive out of another machine (PC2) and plugged it into PC1, booted to a Ghost 7.5 floppy and did a disk to disk copy from PC1's hard drive to PC2's hard drive.

I reinstalled PC2's hard drive and booted, the Ghosted copy works and I am able to login to the XP installation. I used an application called NewSID (from SysInternals, recommended in Microsoft's KB) and changed the SID and computer name.

Problem: Network / Internet performance is sluggish, at best. When I try to browse the web, often I get page cannot be displayed messages, though normally I can at least bring up google. When I run google searchs the results take forever to appear, though often I get a page cannot be displayed. I am unable to download a 50KB file...it will usually get about halfway done and stop.

Attempted Fixes: I have reinstalled the Ethernet adapter, but that has no effect.

Other Info: We are in a domain environment, and if I login to the domain or if I login as the Administrator I get the same poor performance. I am getting a good ip address, DNS server is correct...when I do an ipconfig all the info looks good (as best I can tell). I actually ghosted 4 machines, and they are all acting exactly the same...so I know its an issue with the imaging process and not the individual machine.

Anyone have any ideas? I'd be willing to paypay some $ to anyone who can solve this.

9/14/2005 4:56:49 PM

get new ghosting software

9/14/2005 5:01:09 PM

You could try syspreping the machine to make sure it clears out any traces of the orignal imaged machine's settings.

9/14/2005 5:05:21 PM

^ I curious what settings could have been maintained considering what Ghost does to a hard drive.

[Edited on September 14, 2005 at 5:15 PM. Reason : ]

9/14/2005 5:12:18 PM

Just to be clear, the original machine, PC1, works perfectly. I can browse the web, run searches, download files etc with no problems.

On all 4 machines I ghosted to I see the exact same crappy network behavior detailed above.

9/14/2005 5:59:02 PM

Quote :

"I curious what settings could have been maintained considering what Ghost does to a hard drive. "

all the settings are maintained. A ghosted image is an exact duplicate of a hdd. So if you stick it into another machine with even slightly different hardware you could have problems when windows boots. This is also the reason they suggest you reset the SID.

sysprep will remove everything unique to the machine includind SID, network name, the registry, and drivers.

A better idea would be to sysprep the original machine and make a ghost image after you sysprep it. This is how we do it where i work and it solves most problems.

9/14/2005 6:51:37 PM

1. Does having the original machine on the network affect it at all? That is to say, turn off all of the machines except one of the bad ones, and verify that the network speed still sucks. That will rule out any possible interference-type shenanigans.

2. Take the harddrive out of the first (good) one and put it in one of the others and verify that it still works fine. That will rule out any possible issues with the hardware/drivers.

3. Run filemon (also from Sysinternals) on one of the bad ones, let it capture you surfing for a bit, and then search for the hostname of the good machine. Its possible there may be some references to the original box left over in the registry, in which case you would be seeing a bunch of timeouts. Something along the lines of this: http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/08/case-of-intermittent-and-annoying.html

That's about all I can think of at the moment...

9/14/2005 7:32:16 PM

This is why you only ghost an image when the computers are not going to be on the same network.

9/14/2005 7:55:35 PM

Quote :

"I curious what settings could have been maintained considering what Ghost does to a hard drive."

i was saying i was curious what settings would be maintained from the machines's old install...but now i see what you were saying in your first post

Quote :

"A better idea would be to sysprep the original machine and make a ghost image after you sysprep it. This is how we do it where i work and it solves most problems."

that sounds like a plan...if we can find a copy of sysprep

Quote :

"Does having the original machine on the network affect it at all?"

no i've had it on the network by it on the newwork by itself and it's still afu

9/14/2005 7:57:48 PM

try resetting winsock....

"netsh winsock reset"

at the command prompt.

9/14/2005 11:34:16 PM

use ghostwalk to change the sid

[Edited on September 15, 2005 at 1:50 AM. Reason : also, if you have ghost 7.5, ghost over tcp ip with the drives in their respective machines]

9/15/2005 1:49:33 AM

I have an entire network here of 30 or so computers with the same images. It does help that they are almost all the exact same kind of computer so that we do not have to worry about the drivers and differences in the computers, but it can cause a problem and some minor errors. I have not encountered anything that large though...

9/15/2005 12:13:28 PM

sysprep is a free utility from microsoft.com

9/15/2005 1:03:06 PM

yeah after doing some reading, it seems sysprep is missing from the euqation...I read about possible NETBios conflicts when you clone in the manner I did.

i'm planning on using sysprep this time, and I also might use the UIU utility from Big Bang software.

9/15/2005 8:16:07 PM

So I reinstalled XP, didn't join the doing prior to ghosting, and also ran sysprep prior to ghosting...

same thing happened, same crappy network performance on the ghosted machines.

I've had the machines I've ghosted hooked up to a cheap 16 port netgear switch, but when I unhook them fom the switch and connect them directly to the wall, they work fine. I'm a little curious why this happens, as I don't see the same crappy performance from computers hooked up to the switch that had windows installed normally, just the ghosted ones.

any ideas?

9/20/2005 9:34:18 AM

What about icmp performance when connected to the netgear switch (pinging a host on the internet as well as on the local intranet)?

Do any machines on that switch have normal network application performance?

9/20/2005 10:40:02 AM

Quote :

"Do any machines on that switch have normal network application performance?"

Yes the machines where Windows was installed normally (via CD) work fine when connected to the switch. The ghosted ones perform as indicated in my first post when connected to the switch.

I didn't try any pings, and I can't now since they're already been deployed.

9/20/2005 11:17:28 AM

That's really weird.

switches have very little buffering, and basically either drop or forward a frame upon receipt, CRC verification and MAC lookup. It's not going to differentiate between one host and another unless there's something distinct in the frames on the switch.

a sniffer trace could be very telling.

[Edited on September 20, 2005 at 12:49 PM. Reason : a]

9/20/2005 12:48:39 PM

is it possible that you have the mac address set in the driver on the master machine and have ghosted the new machines to have the same mac address? multiple machines with the same mac on the same switch seems like it would cause trouble to me

9/20/2005 6:54:05 PM

arent mac addresses stored in the firmware of their respective card?

9/20/2005 6:57:45 PM

^ yes but they can be changed, although that would reprogram the address on the NIC's eeprom (or whatever form of storage it has) rather than the hard drive, so ghosting the machine would not include the MAC address of the NIC.

9/21/2005 9:20:44 AM

Can you reprogram the NICs without a programmer?

9/21/2005 10:15:29 AM

not that I know of

9/21/2005 2:22:35 PM

Quote :

"is it possible that you have the mac address set in the driver on the master machine and have ghosted the new machines to have the same mac address? multiple machines with the same mac on the same switch seems like it would cause trouble to me "

thats what i was thinking...but I thought uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers would fix that if it was the case...but nothing changed

9/21/2005 2:25:41 PM