1. Intel PRO/100 (Earlier version)
2. Intel PRO/100 (Newer version – doesn’t work with some older card)
3. Intel PRO/1000
4. Dlink DFE-650 (PCMCIA)
5. Realtek 8029
6. Realtek 8139 (but covers most of the 8100 range)
7. BroadCom B57xx
8. 3Com 10/100 MiniPCI (early Thinkpad)
9. 3Com 3C90X (3C905, etc)
10. Dlink DFE-530TX
11. Realtek 8169 (As used by NetGear GA311)
12. DEC Digital DC21140 (As emulated by Microsoft’s Virtual PC)
13. AMD PCNet (As emulated by various flavours of VMWare)
14. Accton/SMC EN1207D
15. Generic NE2000 compatible (it’s worked on a few oddball cards!)
16. SIS 900
17. SMC 1211
18. Dlink DFE-670 (PCMCIA)
19. National Semiconductor DP83815
20. Broadcom Netlink 4401
21. 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 over the network (Google tFTPd32 and pxelinux! I might write a how-to on this one day).

Everything should be pretty self explanatory – the 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 is meant for a regular 1.44MB floppy, remember!), extracts the NDIS 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 take a look in selcard.bat – and update your chosen card. I wrote protini.exe in VBDos and added support to handle parameters (IP and subnet). Just change the line to follow the format:

As for adding drivers for new cards – again, just edit selcard.bat and place a zipped copy of your NDIS drivers into the \NICs subdirectory.

You can download a copy of the disk images here:

http://www.phirebird.net/files/mnbd.imz

or a self-extracting disk image:

http://www.phirebird.net/files/mnbd.exe

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/apply Ghost or PQDI images to/from PC’s and servers. But you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t already have a use for it – right?