MS-DOS boot disk with network support
Here’s a little gem that I seem to be perpetually working on! An MS-DOS boot disk with MS-LAN Manager, various NDIS network card drivers & DOS TCP/IP support. Currently, the following network cards are supported, but it’s really easy to add your own – as long as you’re not afraid of batch files 
- Intel PRO/100 (earlier versions)
- Intel PRO/100 (when the above doesn’t work – this does!)
- Intel PRO/1000
- Dlink DFE-650 (PCMCIA)
- Realtek 8029
- Realtek 8139 (covers most of the 8100 range)
- BroadCom B57xx
- 3Com 10/100 MiniPCI (early Thinkpad)
- 3Com 3C90X (3C905, etc)
- Dlink DFE-530TX
- Realtek 8169 (As used by NetGear GA311)
- DEC Digital DC21140 (As emulated by Microsoft’s Virtual PC)
- AMD PCNet (As emulated by various flavours of VMWare)
- Accton/SMC EN1207D
- Generic NE2000 compatible (it’s worked on a few oddball cards!)
- SIS 900
- SMC 1211
- Dlink DFE-670 (PCMCIA)
- National Semiconductor DP83815
- Broadcom Netlink 4401
- VIA 10/100 ‘Rhine’
Originally, this was written for a set of floppy disks (which is why you have the option to change your computer name), but currently I use it in the lab to PXE boot (google tFTPd32 and pxelinux! I might write a how-to on this one day). I hope everything should be pretty self explanatory – machine boots, starts DOS, loads himem, a RAM disk and a few other drivers, extracts the base network stuff from net.zip to the ramdisk, throws up a prompt asking what network card you’ve got (yes I could autodetect – but pciscan or equivalent hurt the footprint. This was destined for a regular 1.44MB floppy!), extracts the drivers from the relevant zip, creates protocol.ini and system.ini to match your chosen card, starts the network, grabs an IP with DHCP, and asks for a username/password. Job done!
If you’ve not got a DHCP server on your network (if so, get into the 90′s!) then I wrote protini.exe in VBDos and added support to handle parameters (IP and subnet). I forget what format they had to be in – but seem to remember is was fairly easy.
As for adding drivers for new cards – just edit selcard.bat and bung a zipped copy of your NDIS drivers into the \NICs subdirectory.
You can grab a copy of the image here:
http://www.phirebird.net/files/mnbd.imz
or
Use it at your own risk, blah, blah, if your wife divorces you, blah, blah, don’t blow up, blah, blah, not liable, blah, blah, etc, etc – insert the rest of a usual disclaimer here.
Why would you use this? Well, I’ve found it useful for many reasons – mostly when trying to take or apply images from PC’s and servers. But you wouldn’t be reading this is you didn’t have a use for it – right?
