Optiplex 740 won't rebuild (RM)

[bizzel]

We have some shiny, new Dell Optiplex 740s here that aren't rebuilding. The first one we tried was fine but the rest won't build!

There's lag when booting from the floppy, the whole UI is slow, and the build eventually stalls (for a whole weekend) on "scanning for drivers". I've added things like the motherboard, cpu, audio, graphics and raid drivers onto the build area but it didn't make a difference.

The machine spec is:

AMD Athlon X2
2GB RAM
80Gb HDD
Nvidia nforce 4xx chipset
Nvidia Quadro NVS 210s graphics

[Michael]

Although you've added RAID drivers, you may also need to source SATA drivers too. It's strange how some machines build and others don't though. Are you sure they're using the same motherboard? And have you tried to boot using a standard XP disc and see how far you get with this?

[bossman]

@bizzel:
Seems strange but could I ask what Nic's are in them as we have some very old optiplex's and we found them very strange to build to. We changed them from onboard to pci realtek8139s and they build fine now.

[PeterW]

It certainly sounds nic related as per bossman's post, are you creating your build disk with the latest version of the dos drivers? Also make sure the build disk is not using an exisiting driver which may be out of date, have had this with Realtek & Marvell nics so far.

[bizzel]

They're Broadcom NetxTreme 5700s I think. For now we're Smartclienting them over but I'll give the PCI NIC idea a go.

[ZeroHour]

If it has onboard graphics I would also maybe try yanking the g-card to see if that helps the GUI.
Also have you got the latest firmware for the bios?
What are you using the build (no rm here)?

[PeterW]

Are you making custom build disks for that NIC with the latest drivers or are you using an exisiting build disk?

[gshaw]

If it's an nForce board just hope they're not the nVidia NICs, they're bloody useless! Ended up buying Pro1000 cards for the PCs that came with the nVidia onboard card as they only seem to work inside Windows (not Pe etc) as they seemed to rely on the chipset driver to work

[tech_guy]

Check same mobo in all of them - we had a batch of optiplex a while back that came with two diff models of mobos.

[PeterW]

If it's an nForce board just hope they're not the nVidia NICs, they're bloody useless! Ended up buying Pro1000 cards for the PCs that came with the nVidia onboard card as they only seem to work inside Windows (not Pe etc) as they seemed to rely on the chipset driver to work

I feel your pain, although there is a DOS NDIS driver if you look hard enough it requires that you load another driver file before letting the NDIS driver load (I assume the first driver has the same functrion as the net bus enumerator in windows) I once had to integrate it into an RM build disk for a customer it was not a fun job. I think the more modern Nvidia chipsets use a different method these days thank god.

[gshaw]

I just stick with Intel now, if it don't work with a Pro 1000 card then it ain't worth using :P

With WinPE it's not an NDIS driver either, kinda 1/2 way house - most cards I just whack in SMS and away it goes; the nVidia ones wouldn't budge and it wasn't worth the time \ effort fighting em any longer lol

I know some people don't like em but having Intel mainboards in our Stone systems makes life a lot easier (apart from when they aren't breaking the graphics drivers lol!)

Agree with checking the mainboards, heard stories of em doing it with servers - making a nasty mess of DR planning so wouldn't surprise me one bit if they did the same with PCs!