Black screen after windows splash screen when booting to Ghost boot disk

[Migration User]

Hey guys,

You have been super helpful for me on my journey to discovering and learning Ghost. Thanks for that. I am on my last two servers I need to back up, but I am running into an issue. I have been using the same USB to boot from for all of my HP proliant servers. Every other server seems to work correctly. I boot from USB I get the windows splash screen and it goes into Ghost/winpe page. I am now trying to back up two SQL servers that have an attached HP P2000 SAS controllers. I boot from the USB and get the windows splash screen, but then its just a black screen. I have tried a couple times and I have given it almost 4 hours to sit on the black screen to verify it is not just super slow. I have searched around and have found nothing. My assumption is that I am running into this issue because of the attached P2000 controller. Has anyone run into this issue trying to Ghost a SQL server or a server with an attached SAS controller?

Oh yeah the server in question is a HP Proliant DL380 g7. I believe at one point I injected additional drivers into the ISO incase that was the issue, but got the same results. I know previously when I ran into a driver issue I would still be able to boot to the winpe/Ghost environment, but now its just a black screen.

 

Thanks,

Ricky

[Edward Tippelt]

I guess the first starting point for us non-psychics is to find out which version of Ghost you are using, and whether you are booting WinPE at a specific version, whether it is 32 or 64 bit, and whether you have added the appropriate drivers for the storage system you need to access.

Using WinPE 10 would be my version of choice, as it has the most up to date driver selections built in, and therefore has the best chance of getting somewhere with modern hardware. WinPE loads itself and runs entirely from system memory, but perhaps you have some sort of non-standard video controller that will also require a driver to work with WinPE.  It should not matter from the perspective of WinPE booting, whether there are drive arrays present or not, as the initial boot just requires the ability to load WinPE from CD/DVD or USB stick, into RAM, and display information.

Might also be worth going through the BIOS settings and checking for anything out of the ordinary, and perhaps also try turning off the UEFI bios if it happens to be on.

If the server has a standard hard disk as well as the P2000 controller, try removing the controller and see if that makes a difference to the boot.

[Migration User]

Thank you for the response. Sorry about forgetting to mention version and what not. I started with using Ghost Solution suite console 3.2. I then realized I was running into issues with the PXE server being in an enterprise environment where I dont control access to other PXE servers and for what we needed i was ok using Ghostcast. I have used Ghostcast and a usb loaded with WINPE5.0 I believe. on all of my other servers I have yet to run into an issue... well rather I have yet to run into this issue.

As you mentioned I decided to attempt to remove the P2000 controller and it worked, but I was hoping to ghost it with the controller attached. Well really I was pretty satisfied to be done with the project at this point and was going to look into working around the PXE server issue further, but it seemed like my boss wanted me to Ghost while the P2000 was attached. So I guess my new question is this:

If I clone with the p2000 attached or detached it should be the same data right? I am not backing up the attached storage, just the system data, right? I am pretty new to ghost still, but when I select drives to backup it looks like its just basic system storage. At this point I would be pretty happy to put this project behind me and spend more time working on the PXE aspect of this and figuring out how to make it work in this environment, but I am stuck finishing up these backups. 

Additionally I have tried to download just about every driver for the P2000 without success. No matter what I do it just loads with a black screen. 

Thanks!

[Migration User]

Sorry this took me some time to get back to this. i was sick and stuck on another project last week. i have yet ot really find a solution. I can clone the system drive for the server, but I cannot seem to clone the data drive from the P2000. This is the data from a sql server and is pertty vital to the whole sql experience. At this point I have two questions.

1. Is this possible? Does anyone have experience using ghost to clone a server and attached storage. Any additional details on a sql server would probably help as well.

2. My boss keeps telling me that we have Support for our license, but I dont have any information on how to contact support. This forum has been my support at this point. Does anyone know a way to contact support directly? When i asked him about our support he said it should be in the folder... so not a ton of help.

 

Thanks

[Migration User]

Seems like this thread is dead. I didnt really get the answer I need, so I will keep poking around. At this point unless someone else has more information, feel free to close it.