Alternatives to DOS bootable imaging

[Jonny Block]

Thank you for any assistance. If there are legacy postings with
information on this topic, please let me know what keywords to search on.

We currently use a very nice DOS bootable CD to connect to our file server
housing XP-based ghost images. We have a nice menuing scheme allowing
technical staff easy access to image loading.

It's getting harder and harder to find DOS device drivers for NICs, and
we're somewhat tired of not being able to force 100/Full speed when
imaging.

Any DOS alternatives that will still allow us to script/program a menuing
scheme, and use Ghost (16/32 bit) to dump images?

Thanks again.
JonnyB

 

[george]

Maybe you want to look into BartPE.
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

That might be the ticket.

george

 

[Jonny Block]

Thanks for the input, George. BartPE has been discussed, but there are
issues with licensing that won't let us take advantage in our corporate
environmnet.

Appreciate the thought!
JonnyB

 

[Al Dykes]

Thanks for the input, George. BartPE has been discussed, but there are
issues with licensing that won't let us take advantage in our corporate
environmnet.

Appreciate the thought!
JonnyB

The need you use existing ghost images is going to be a showstoipper. IMO
yoiu should phase them out.

I use Acronis (Linux based) to image clients from a boot CD over a LAN
and think it's great. It's not scriptable. Contact Acronis. They may
have a solution I'm not aware of.

If you need to be license-free you could hack a Knoppix distro (or any
of several run-from-CD distros) to use dd to make images on a file
server and to read images to make ntfs/fat32 systems.

 

[Patrick J. LoPresti]

Modern machines support booting from the network. When you boot from
the network, you can use a "universal" NDIS driver (e.g., the one from
http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/nic/mba.htm) on your DOS boot
disk. This single DOS driver supports ANY network card, but only when
you boot from the network. (It interfaces to the PXE/UNDI stack which
the card itself uses to netboot.)

One approach is to use the PXELINUX and memdisk utilities from the
SYSLINUX package. For a sample system which does this, see
<http://unattended.sourceforge.net/>. This is how I install all of my
systems; or rather, how I used to install them, before we switched to
using a Linux boot disk and dosemu... But the DOS boot disk is still
there, and you can use it as an example for creating your own
network-bootable DOS ramdisk.

- Pat

 

[Jonny Block]

Thanks for the info, Pat. We've disabled PXE the vast majority of our
machines because we simply weren't using it and some manager along the
way decided it was too confusing at boot time for the normal user. Oh
what a tangled web we weave.

I've started looking toward the Linux/DOSEmu option also - willing to
share your details?

Our standard corporate 'image' is very close to being OS/Updates only at
this point, which opens up the door to dump Ghost in favor of an
unattended install scenario. Thanks for the sourceforge input - I'll do
the research.

JonnyB

 

[Guest]

If you are licensed to use WinPE, then this will solve your issue. WinPE
autodetects most network cards, and starts an IP stack, from whence you can
map a network share and restore a ghost image.

I have created quite a few custom WinPE boot CD's that do exactly this - it
just works really well, so much nicer than DOS boot disks.

BartPE is essentially an unlicensed WinPE.....