Troubles with DL360G3, Ghosting and XMS memory

[Gordon Woodward]

I'm having some trouble ghosting one of our new HP DL360 G3 servers through DOS. I've got DOS network bootdisk which uses the Broadcom drivers (B57.DOS) and detects the built-in NICs fine but I keep getting back DOS errors saying that there isn't enough upper memory to run Ghost.

Here is a copy of my CONFIG.SYS

DEVICE=A:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=A:\DOS\EMM386.EXE I=E000-EFFF I=B000-B7FF NOEMS VERBOSE
DOS=AUTO
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICEHIGH=A:\DOS\IFSHLP.SYS
STACKS=9,256
FILES=60
BUFFERS=30
FCBS=16,0
SHELL=A:\COMMAND.COM /E:1024 /P
LASTDRIVE=Z

The server won't even boot propery into DOS if I use the above EMM386 line, with the included memory addresses. If I remove the E000-EFFF & B000-B7FF then it will actually boot into DOS but comes back with UMB errors still.

If I run a MEM /C it reports back that there is 4095kb of free memory alloacted to Extended Memory but shows a ? under the amount utilised.

The same bootdisk works perfectly on other Dell machines which have the same NIC, with no memory errors encountered at all. I don't have any other Compaqs to test the disk on because this is our first and only Compaq at this stage.

Does anyone know if there are any Compaq specific EMM386 memory address inclusions needed or any tricks I might need to try?

TIA

[Brian_Murdoch · Accepted solution]

Gordon,

Try the following Universal Boot Disk to see if it works. This supports the B57.DOS driver and can be used for Ghost etc.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~bdriver/bootdisk/usage.htm

Click on the "Supported Cards" link to see the drivers included and "Download" to get the disk image.

You will need 1 disk, formatted with XP.

Hope this helps.

Brian

[Gordon Woodward]

Thanks Brians, that bootdisk appears to work a bit better and surprisingly it's not even running any memory managers. Perhaps XP bootdisks handle DOS memory better then the older DOS/Windows bootdisks?

[Brian_Murdoch]

Hi Gordon,

Yes I agree. The memory management appears to be more efficient as I noticed that Ghost and other utilities used across the network appear to be a bit faster than normal.

Drop a note to the author at his web site. He's a fellow Australian and keen to find out where his disk has ended up.

Regards,

Brian