Networking with DOS

[networkwoes]

I am looking for a resorce to teach me how to create a DOS boot disk that will allow me to do a "net use" command to map a network drive for the purpose of ghosting. I am using ghost 2001 and do not want to have both PCs booted up in DOS. I know there are several programs that will create network boot disk, but the cards i am using dont seem to be listed in most of them, plus i would like to actually understand what all of the files on the boot disk are for, so that in the future if i need a new driver i can easily add it. If anyone can tell me where to start looking it would be greatly appreciated!

 

[juggy]

Networking for dos now has got trickier with advances in hardware. Firstly you need to make sure your network card has an NDIS 2 driver for it. If not forget it. If it does get an NT4.0 Server CD and on that there is an easy to use very simple dos client for booting a pc onto the network. My suggestion to you though is not all cards are the same so no one disk will work globally. Get a CD cutter. Cut the image onto CD and make the CD bootable. You can either be very lucky and have CD's with a bootable cd bios option on the PC and when this operation fails you can make a boot disk and purchase a printer port CD for around 100/200 and load the software from there giving you one disk and a CD with various images you choose.

 

[MasterRacker]

The MS drivers on the disks will vary depending on whether you're using TCP/IP or NetBEUI. Then every adapter will also have it's own drivers. Also, as juggy said, many newer adapters no longer are being developed with NDIS 2 drivers. It's very old technology that vendors don't want to deal with. If you really want to dig into specifics I would suggest Microsoft's Knowledge Base at

http://support.microsoft.com

I like juggy's idea. These days, any machine that's still worh running will be able to boot from CD. Seems like a good way to propagate images.
Jeff

I haven't lost my mind - I know it's backed up on tape somewhere ....

 

[cowboy405]

After you get the NDIS 2 driver for your nic, you still need a client
on your boot disk to communicate with Win networks. Microsoft
does provide this dos client. I found it about a month ago at:

http://oem.microsoft.com

Sign up, it's worth it.

Dennis

 

[juggy]

Cheers Jeff,

Dennis the problem your going to get there is you will get new pc's off all shapes and sizes contributing to the build of the PC unless your lucky and have manages standards so an NDIS 2 driver is really a shortfall solution especially as cards get more and more sophisticated. Stick with Ghost and build the image without the net client, include all the drivers in a nice sounding directory and ghost away. Weve been doing it for over 3 years since ibms dos client had the same problem and the microsoft one was far too flakey for production use.