Recovery Network Issues....

[kempfta]

Booting from the system recovery disk, I cannot get networking to function. My system images for recovery are located on a sever and I need to have networking function in order to recover. I have tried loading the network driver after booting from the SR disk, I have tried creating a custom system recovery disk with the network driver included on it. Nothing seems to work. An ipconfig /release or /renew only dumps the following error "The operation failed as no adapter is in the state permissible for this operation".  I have even tried stopping and starting network services manually "net stop netman, net start netman".

The network card in question is an "Intel 82559 Fast Ethernet LOM with alert on LAN".

I have tried downloading a new driver directly from Intel. No difference. The computer works fine when booted normally, but when booted from the recovery disk the network is dead.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Where can I go from here? I really need to recover this system!

[marcogsp]

This is a common error.  When loading the drivers for the recovery environment, be sure to use the Vista or Server 2008 drivers.  The recovery environment is WinPE using the Vista/Server 2008 code base, so the drivers for the recovery environment need to be compatible for that.  This is true even if the OS of the recovered system is XP or Server 2003 or Win2k.  If the recovery process needs to retarget the system for new storage and network drivers, it will either use the drivers available on the recovery disk, or prompt for the appropriate drivers.  At this point it would then need the OS specific drivers.