WinPE 2.0 Network Drivers for HP NC375i

Hello Everyone,
I have been a member of this forum for a long time and it has answered many questions on WinPE/BartPE Builds in the past. You do a great job for the community.
I have spent untold hours trying to get a Driver to work with WinPE 2.0 (LiveCD) for the HP ML370G6 default NIC. (NC375i)(Quad Port Gigabit NIC). From reading posts on different forums and researching white papers, WinPE 2.0 does not support VBD (Virtual Bus Device) Drivers. I have tried the Netxen Driver and the Qlogic Driver, but none of them work in the build I am working with. I can get the Card Name to show up, but no configuration in available. I am just looking to see if anyone has run into this VBD issue and if there are any workarounds, besides waiting for HP to write a RIS/WinPE Driver for this particular card. HPs answer so far is that they don't support WinPE on the G6 Series of Servers. My company buys a lot of Servers from HP, but we are now looking at going to another Vendor, if we can't get this resolved. Any thought would be greatly appreciated. I have a Server here in my office to test with, if anyone has any ideas.

Thanks
Keith

Hello Everyone,
I have been a member of this forum for a long time and it has answered many questions on WinPE/BartPE Builds in the past. You do a great job for the community.
I have spent untold hours trying to get a Driver to work with WinPE 2.0 (LiveCD) for the HP ML370G6 default NIC. (NC375i)(Quad Port Gigabit NIC). From reading posts on different forums and researching white papers, WinPE 2.0 does not support VBD (Virtual Bus Device) Drivers. I have tried the Netxen Driver and the Qlogic Driver, but none of them work in the build I am working with. I can get the Card Name to show up, but no configuration in available. I am just looking to see if anyone has run into this VBD issue and if there are any workarounds, besides waiting for HP to write a RIS/WinPE Driver for this particular card. HPs answer so far is that they don't support WinPE on the G6 Series of Servers. My company buys a lot of Servers from HP, but we are now looking at going to another Vendor, if we can't get this resolved. Any thought would be greatly appreciated. I have a Server here in my office to test with, if anyone has any ideas.

Thanks
Keith

Hi Keith

I think the reason why HP tells you that WinPE is not supported, is that it is not considered an official and certified OS for server. Likewise there is no official support for FreeBSB on HP servers.

Indirectly HP does use WinPE in some of the tools, such as the free SmartStart Scripting Toolkit (SSTK) and with the non-free RDP solution (Symantec Altiris). Both those products Both products you can download trial software, and see if / how they work.

Personally I had a few trials before I got a vanilla WinPE to work with the Proliant G5 and G6. I finally found the VBD driver, and then it worked.
The only difference I can see it that I use the plain vanilla WinPE from the WAIK (for Windows Vista SP1) from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft...&displaylang=en). I did not need anything else (more fancy) for my project.

It has been a while since I worked on that project (1-1½ years), so I do not have it in fresh memory. The driver .inf files and scripts I need to dig out of my archive, to double check them.

Maybe someone else has something more recent and accessible.

Best regards
Michael

Thanks for the thoughtful replay Michael. We are using this WinPE Boot CD (LiveCD) for Image Restores and Diags, and we are not having any problems with the other, older HP Servers, including the G5 Series. We use this for remote support, with VNC Server on WinPE as the access. Active@ Disk Image disk imaging software is embedded in the build for backups and restores.
I will try the Altiris to see if it supports the NIC correctly and then try to get the driver out of there if possible. If it is a Linux Driver, it probably won't help with this issue, but definitely worth a shot.
HP has written separate drivers for RIS/WinPE support for all of their other NICs, in the past which work great, but there isn't one that supports the NC375i Quad Port Qlogic Card. It's kind of funny that HP chose this particular card for the new ML370/DL380 G6 Series and then don't support it for WinPE, which has been our recover solution for some time now. They are giving me a bad case of Heartburn at the moment.

Thanks

Keith

Thanks for the thoughtful replay Michael. We are using this WinPE Boot CD (LiveCD) for Image Restores and Diags, and we are not having any problems with the other, older HP Servers, including the G5 Series. We use this for remote support, with VNC Server on WinPE as the access. Active@ Disk Image disk imaging software is embedded in the build for backups and restores.
I will try the Altiris to see if it supports the NIC correctly and then try to get the driver out of there if possible. If it is a Linux Driver, it probably won't help with this issue, but definitely worth a shot.
HP has written separate drivers for RIS/WinPE support for all of their other NICs, in the past which work great, but there isn't one that supports the NC375i Quad Port Qlogic Card. It's kind of funny that HP chose this particular card for the new ML370/DL380 G6 Series and then don't support it for WinPE, which has been our recover solution for some time now. They are giving me a bad case of Heartburn at the moment.

Thanks

Keith

SmartStart Scripting Toolkit Win32 Edition
Version 2.20c – Release Date November 19, 2009

After extraction of hpDrivers archive winpe21psp830x86.exe
found in nic\hp3n folder hp3n6x86.* with support for "HP NC375i Integrated Quad Port Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter"

Have you tried this driver?

Also check firmware and update if required:
DL370 G6 and NC375i issues

Hello bilou_gateux,
You do not know how much I appreciate you answering this post. I just tried the driver an it works fine. I have been working on this problem for over 2 weeks with HP and numerous others to try to lear this up. I have tried 20 or so different drivers but never found this one.

Thanks again

Keith

Just click the Thanks! button.

Because you're a user who really like to express your thanks to my post.

I still do not understand how you got this to work.
I have used the files from the SmartStart Scripting Toolkit 2.20c as describe and extracted out the "nic\hp3n folder hp3n6x86.inf from the winpe21psp830x86.exe as described.
Still does not work.
I have used both methods. Using online injection and offline injenction.
Examples (to make sure I did commands right):
drvload.exe C:\WAIK\nic\hp3n\hp3n6x86.inf (driver sucessfully loaded)

peimg.exe /inf="C:\WAIK\nic\hp3n6x86.inf" C:\WAIK\mount\Windows