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Boot floppy with network access?


Iain

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I saw a demonstration of W2K installation from a hard drive. The drive was partitioned and the current OS was DOS 6.22. The W2K installation files (in the i386 folder) were on a different partition. The demonstrator ran smartdrv.exe (for caching, I believe) and then ran d:i386winnt. The installation proceeded very quickly, presumably as reading from the CD was avoided.

It strikes me that I could install that way over a peer to peer network (cross-over cable or cat5 into a hub) but I'd have to be able to boot into a DOS environment with network access. Is that possible? I've seen some boot floppies at www.bootdisk.com but they don't say explicitly that they will provide network access. I'd prefer to use a boot floppy rather than a bootable CD. Any ideas? I suspect that, if I get into a suitable environment, I'd type othercomputernamec$ from the DOS machine and then negotiate my way to the i386 folder. Is this correct?

Finally, I'd like to try this just to see if it can be done. I have read about deployment via RIS but I'm not at that stage yet. I simply want to play around in a small peer-peer environment.

Thanks for your time.

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Brilliant - many thanks.

I had a roller coaster of emotions as I scrolled through the thread. First, down as it couldn't be done, then up as it can be done but I'd have to build my own drivers into it (can *I* really do that?) then way, way up as I clicked on www.netbootdisk.com! I'd better dust off an old PC and my cross-over cable as it looks like I have some homework for the Easter period.

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we used to use a boot floppy with net support and ghost. kept all the images on a server by computer model, then whenever we wanted to we'd boot with floppy and run ghost and bam just like it was when it came out of the box

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That's a good idea - I have Norton Ghost and have always slaved a drive in a PC. Did you use the floppy at www.netbootdisk.com or something else? I'm intrigued about the possibility of adding my own network driver to a boot floppy. I have a W98 and a WMe boot floppy and it would be great to make my bespoke boot floppy with network support. I know there are some guidelines for adding to the netbootdisk one but any idea how I'd add to my own disk?

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That's a good idea - I have Norton Ghost and have always slaved a drive in a PC. Did you use the floppy at www.netbootdisk.com or something else? I'm intrigued about the possibility of adding my own network driver to a boot floppy. I have a W98 and a WMe boot floppy and it would be great to make my bespoke boot floppy with network support. I know there are some guidelines for adding to the netbootdisk one but any idea how I'd add to my own disk?

It was a win98 boot floppy with batch file to load drivers for nic, it had the most common nic drivers. then just mapped the netdrive and run ghost. company got new machines every quarter and programmers got them and the programmers old machine went to a someone like hr/accounting types.

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