Many years ago, having a good floppy bootdisk is the MOST important thing whenever I need to reinstall Windows 95. Back then, motherboards doesn’t support booting up using CDROM and software such as PLoP still don’t exist. So I need to insert a floppy that has CDROM drivers which will enable CDROM so I can install Windows 95 from the installation disc. It is very troublesome because floppy disks are very sensitive and I always need to carry along a box of bootup floppies just in case a lot of them doesn’t work.
Most new motherboards can support booting up via floppy, CDROM, USB, and even network via PXE which makes the the use of floppy bootup disks nearly obsolete. However, although we seldom use floppy bootup disk, I just wanted to share with you a very good and useful network bootdisk called NetBootDisk which has helped me easily cloned many computers with Symantec Ghost in the past. Other than using network boot disk to do hard disk cloning, you can use it to gain network access in DOS so you can recover data from FAT based partitions before formatting dead Windows installs. Other than that, you can also test the network connection by isolating windows when you are unsure if it is a hardware or software problem.
The Universal TCP/IP Network Bootdisk (NetBootDisk) is a DOS bootdisk that provides TCP/IP networking support. It’s designed for use in Microsoft networking environments, on either peer-to-peer or domain based LANs. From the changelog, the latest NetBootDisk v6.2 includes 150 different network card drivers, all on the single 1.44MB disk!
NetBootDisk features:
Fully automatic, single floppy disk operation 150 Drivers included on the same single 1.44MB disk Easy to use Menu Interface Autodetection of PCI network cards DHCP or static IP configuration Included/Optional DNS Support Included/Optional DIS_PKT9 Packet Driver, allowing DOS TCP/IP Apps, including Ghost Multicasting! Included/Optional Mouse Driver Included/Optional IDE CD-ROM Driver Random computer name upon each boot (optional) Ideal for quickly booting multiple machines at once. Menu preferences, including last non-autodetected network card saved to disk as defaults for next boot Password saved encrypted to disk. Ability to auto-execute command upon logging on to the LAN. Scripting support for automatically running NTFS-DOS LMHOSTS Support Freeware DOSKEY included Terse 4096 byte Text Editor included Able to display the MAC address SATA CD/DVD-ROM Support No hard drive required
I’ve used NetBootDisk to easily clone 30 computers using Ghost via network without going through any complicated scripting or server configurations. Just have a box of Netboot floppy disks, install a Linux SME Server on an old computer (don’t be frightened by the word Linux because SME Server is REALLY easy to setup!), create an image of one computer with Ghost and save it on the shared folder located at Linux SME Server. Finally boot up the rest of the computers with NetBootDisk to connect to the server and dump it with Ghost using the image that was created earlier. I then read my newspaper and by the time I finish reading it, the cloning process has completed. Well there are many other methods (multicast, PXE and etc) and softwares (LiveZilla and etc) to clone multiple computers and this is just one of them…
It is possible to convert the floppy version of NetBootDisk to bootable CD. If you have a floppy drive, you can refer to this guide on how to create a CDROM version of NetBootDisk with Nero. For some new computers that doesn’t come with floppy drive, you can create a virtual floppy drive with VM Back, then create the NetbootDisk to the virtual floppy and burn it with Nero using the guide above. I prefer to use floppy if I am required to clone a lot of computers because it is faster and cheaper compared to CDROM.
Nice Info, I Like IT
help naman po d ko po kac malagyan ng lan driver so ibig sabihin wala na xeang net?.TAKEN-reformat dati xea XP3 pinalitan ko po ng Xp2 ngaun wala na net built in po ung lan card nya,kailangan ko po ngaun ng lan driver para magkaroon ng net..tnx po sana ma2lungan nyo po ako..maraming beses na po ako download wala po ako nakukuha..T_T.
and I make a shawl as a bootable diskette Armand Compaq 1560d
sal cum fac si eu o disketa butabila pentru un compaq armand 1560d
is there a way to add more network card drivers ?
Thanks
Is there a way with ghost 11 to get the network boot cd to get the ip and automatic load into ghost 32 with ghost 11
How can i script that to run off of USB or CD? make a muti network boot cd that automatic loads into ghost 11?
Please help
Hi,
I just to access the site and the site displays garbage. Can I download the file anywhere else. Thanks in advance.
Is that not what Bart PE does. One can prepare a boot-able CD Rom and then there will be no limitations like accessing windows 2003 servers from the boot CD.
you will not require the hard drive in the system you are using the boot cd from. Bart PE is available here.
nu2.nu/pebuilder/
I never needed anything after using Bart PE.
Friends! please comment on that.
Will VM Back, the virtual floppy mounting software you mention, allow someone to do an F6 driver load from floppy during XP installation? need to be able to install SATA drivers but this is not possible w/o a floppy drive.
This is a little off topic, but floppy disks being fragile is somewhat of a myth. I recently backed up my collection to hdd (even some 360K), and almost all were ok, even though they had not been used in maybe 15 or more years. For a tech, the real danger seems to be machines with a bad drive which will chew up your disk.
1-can you post the steps you follow to do the ghost stuff you pinpoint in your article?
2-do you need a multicast server and the SME server can act as a multicast one?
Thankz in advance keep the amazing work.
i tried usung the MAC makeup but i cant open this file so i cudnt run this setup on my pc.this hotspot shield is not wrking on my laptop,so i tried d way u had told.but cudnt.suggest me smthing
Thanks Ray…
Just want to share to all here that DEMONOID is now open for sign up…
I have 2 question:
1. if it is really success, how can I access network drive in DOS? (replacement for typing 192.168.0.1 in Windows Explorer).
2. How can I combine it with WDS? I have success using WDS with Dell D630, but failed with portege 2000. I have been inject all lan driver I know, but still failed.
Thanks Ray!
Thanks for this. WDS ( previously known as RIS ) was so long process.
Thanks for this soft, actually i had a friend who have internet connecting problems since 2 weeks, so I was reading 18 Steps to a TCP/IP Boot Disk
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb726979.aspx
sure this Network Bootdisk will be of a great help;
Basic features
The basic components of a TCP/IP network boot disk include the following:
1)DOS boot files (Command.com, Io.sys, Msdos.sys)
2)NIC DOS (real mode) driver (e.g., E100b.dos for the Intel NICs)
3)TCP/IP DOS drivers (Tcpdrv.dos)
4)A DOS binding utility (Netbind.exe)
5)A network utility (Net.exe)
6)DOS memory management drivers (Himem.sys)
7)Configuration files (Autoexec.bat, Config.sys, Protocol.ini, System.ini)
Thanks for the good post.
Thank you Ray, as always very good tip ;)
Thanks Raymond. I have been using this disk for many years now but it’s great that your site is spreading the word of this fanststic tool. For those interested, the disc is created by an Australian by the name of Brad and you can make a donation toward his effort here – netbootdisk.com/donate.htm
Hmmm looks cool….
Thx