Boot Menu to boot from a different partition into DOS?

[Kelemvor]

OK, here's a little background info.

We have some laptops setup with 3 partitions. Partitions 1 and 2 are standard C and D drive running Windows XP. 3rd partition is a FAT partition that has some ghost image files on it that we use to reimage the first 2 partitions.

Currently I boot from a Win 98 floppy disk. Because Part 1 and 2 are NTFS, it doesn't see them at all so I just run ghost from a batch file that loads the image onto the partitions.

What I want to do is not have to use a floppy disk or CD but somehow press a button or something to get some sort of boot menu in which I can tell it to boot off the 3rd partition. The 3rd partition would just load into DOS and run the batch file so we just didn't have to use a disk any more.

Any ideas?

 

[nweaver]

setup a PXE server and network boot them, but the boot files on the pxe server, press F12 (normal default, iirc for network boot).

 

[Kelemvor]

Have any info on a PXE server and how you set one up? I've seen computers set to network boot looking for one but never knew what it was... And that would mean all the laptops would have to be on the network for that to work... Ideally we would just use the laptop and it's hard drives by itself but it might help a bit...

 

[Woody419]

Bootit NG will do what you want.