How to identify and resolve network adapter driver issues in Ghost 3.x preboot environment.


Article ID: 165162


Updated On:


Ghost Solution Suite


You are booting to Windows PE, and you experience an error message during the bootup process. 

Restarting DHCP client service: retry 1...
Restarting DHCP client service: retry 2...

The message will repeat 19 times.



This error message can appear in two circumstances. Either the machine is unable to reach the DHCP server, or it lacks a network adapter driver. 

To determine which circumstance you are dealing with, after the bootup process has completed, go to the Command prompt and run the following command:


  • If it returns: "The operation failed as no adapter is in the state permissible for this operation"...
    That means you need a network adapter driver.
  • If it returns: "No operation can be performed on Ethernet while it has its media disconnected"...
    That means the ethernet cable is disconnected.
  • If it returns an IP address in the 169.254.x.x range...
    That means it has an appropriate driver, and is plugged in to the network, but it cannot reach a DHCP server.
  • If it returns "Windows IP Configuration" - and nothing else...
    That means it is a Ghost Standard Tools boot disk where the task type was set to "Standalone". 



  1. Identify the version of Windows PE that your preboot environment is using.
  2. Identify which network adapter is present on the machine
  3. Locate the correct adapter driver for that network adapter and version of Windows PE
  4. Add the driver to Ghost
  5. Rebuild your preboot environment

Steps 1-3 are covered in this document.

Steps 4 and 5 are covered in this document.

If the above did not resolve the issue, the same error has been noted as a result of bad or out of date bois firmware. In those cases the issue was resolved by updating the firmware to the version that was seen as working on other like branded machines.